I trade online. When is the time for me to go real?

After a series of our topics about online shopping, I was asked: “Here I have my own shop. How to understand that everything, Ales, you need to quit the main work and do it in full, plus look for a place in the city below the point? ”

Shop in real life as a plus online site

We started from an online store, and the first physical store was viewed not as an independent retail outlet, but as a continuation of online trading, and here's why:

• First, it was a great ad . The store attracted people from the street who were completely unfamiliar with our online activities. When we started to get on the big flow, it automatically meant good sales from the store itself.
• Secondly, we needed to turn out the fame of the goods (at the time of our entry into the market, board games were known to quite a few people as a phenomenon). For example, putting in a shopping center that visits half the city, you can become familiar to people to the stage where they sooner or later will go and buy. The more often they see, the higher the awareness and the higher the chance of buying. This is very important: an unfamiliar thing can be turned into a familiar one in just 3-6 contacts. Past the online store can not pass: by the real you can, and this should be used.
• Thirdly, the point in real life is a natural place for self-pickup . Many people prefer to come and buy goods on their own, finding them on the net. Oddly enough, but many still do not trust online stores or simply do not want to wait for the courier. Perhaps the fact is that the real store interface is more familiar.
• Fourthly, a point is a demonstration platform for goods : there you can touch and see things close, plus, for example, try on clothes or check some kind of device. There you can also make an additional sale, simply by showing that there is more interesting. It worked like this for us: the person ordered the “Monopoly”, came to the site, understood that there are board games many times cooler and more fun - and he took something else.
• And, fifthly, the store in real life acts as a means, slightly raising the credibility of the online store . A client online thinks something like this: “an online store can evaporate at any time, and a store on the street is definitely not going anywhere.”

How to understand when to open a real office and for which stores?

1. The product should be potentially interesting to a wide audience from the street : for example, board games and toys are definitely interesting to everyone, but, for example, some specialized gadgets can be sold only through the network.
2. There should be more than 30 deliveries from different customers per day . This is an indicative sign that interest in the product "on the street" will be - and a guarantee that you can survive the first months working for rent. For example, part of our franchisee outlets opened precisely after the owners took the bulk of the games to trade in their region, and they understood that it was going.
3. Specifically, games are best sold without packaging , so the point was needed as soon as possible. In general, for any product that you need to feel and look in order to make a purchase decision, the packaging is superfluous. Shoes and clothing, for example, so far very few people decide to buy through the network (but many are ready to choose), and many - for equipment.
4. A point in a good place increases product penetration . We have a scenario like this in a new place: a person comes to ask what is there, sees games, plays a little and often leaves until the next time. But at the same time he becomes a "viral agent", telling friends about the store. And returns a month later to buy a gift. Another interesting point is that many of the online store can come to "doubt the place" and thus get the final impetus to purchase.
5. The big problem was that the assortment had to get into the room . The fact is that an online store can work without actual availability of goods, and a store in real life is not. Some online stores specialize in selling thousands of items of relatively rare goods - and for them either a sample of the TOP-100 type is made, or something else is invented. We lay out everything, and this at one time made logistics very difficult - accordingly, we need to think about the correct information system as a background. Now the availability of goods is taken into account in real-time and goes both to the client part (to the site) and to the deliveries.

Another important point - is that the advantage should not be violated from the transition to the real . For example, you can easily find places with a very high flow, but at the same time renting there will be several times more expensive. A logical step for a non-network store would be price increases, but we cannot do this: on the website and in all stores they should be the same. By the way, some appoint higher prices in real life compared to an online store (for example, some optics are doing this), and this causes sincere bewilderment of customers, plus a lot of problems with self-delivery.

In order to choose a place, it is worthwhile to additionally analyze the traffic of deliveries: it can prompt a lot of interesting things, including intermediate points between interesting areas. In Moscow, for example, couriers have a “magic courtyard”: every day during the year at least one delivery takes place in a rectangle of four tall apartment buildings.
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And one more thing: it’s best to open a point in real life before starting seasonal sales (if you don’t know, you can view it through Google Trends): this way it will be beaten off most quickly.

More in our blog on Habré: about the choice of location in general , the case of opening in the shopping center .