How Your Non-eCommerce Website Can Increase Sales

Dan Blank -- Expert Business Source, 1/3/2007 2:58:00 PM

As web-only businesses begin to thrive, owners of brick and mortar retail stores must learn to leverage the web to their advantage. After all, many online retailers do not have the two critical elements that owners of retail stores can leverage to their advantage:

• Merchandise customers can touch, wear, and fall in love with.
• A professional salesperson to help them navigate the sometimes confusing array of choices in front of them, and help bridge the gap between their desires and wallet.

JCK magazine looks at two critical ways that you can use your website to increase sales, even if you don’t sell online:

• Trust: You can tell your company story, and start building that relationship before the customer even walks in the store.
• Value: It gives you an opportunity to educate customers who may not be knowledgeable about specifics of your products, and “elevate the customer's perception of the value of your merchandise and the benefit of buying it from you.”

You can also leverage your websites for marketing efforts, and to extend your relationship with customers who have already purchased from you, increasingly the likelihood that they will become repeat customers.

Even huge companies such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy work to drive traffic to their website for in-store only events.