How retailers plan to encourage online shopping and foot traffic this summer
As stores reopen around the world, retailers are using resilient methods to survive and thrive during the pandemic.
We informally polled our retail customers and prospects during recent conversations to learn what they’re doing this summer to encourage foot traffic and online shopping, while also reducing reverse logistics costs. Following are highlights from the several dozen conversations.
Read all the way to the bottom to see which COVID-accelerated trends retailers predict will stick the longest.
How DTC and omnichannel retailers plan to encourage online shopping.
When it comes to enticing customers to shop, there are two tactics that retailers reported most often:
Introducing new products
Offering light discounts of 10-20%
While the former is a great opportunity to enhance offerings and customer lifetime value, experts warn against going overboard with the latter, as it has the potential to damage a shopper’s perception of your brand.
As The Business of Fashion and McKinsey's State of Fashion Coronavirus Update explains, offering sitewide discounts trains customers to always expect sales. Instead, consider discounting only certain items at a time, and announcing the discounts on social media to encourage shoppers to visit your channels often.
How brick-and-mortar stores plan to encourage foot traffic.
To ensure customers feel comfortable returning to brick-and-mortar stores this summer, those retailers plan to clearly communicate new health and safety standards that include recommended protocols like:
The use of personal protective equipment
Increased cleaning
Enforced limited store occupancy
More than half of the retailers we spoke to also plan to enhance their omnichannel offerings to attract shoppers. Omnichannel tactics like Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup are becoming attractive options for shoppers to make a purchase online and retrieve it in-person when it’s most convenient.
How retailers plan to reduce reverse logistics costs.
Since retailers overspend up to 20% when paying for returns by mail, reverse logistics provide a great opportunity to cut costs. Despite that savings possibility, we were interested to discover that more than half of polled retailers plan to continue operating their reverse logistics as they had before the pandemic started. If this isn’t a competitive opportunity for their peers, I don’t know what is.
Those that do plan for change are focused in two areas:
Automating returns online, to reduce their customer service burden.
Promoting exchanges during online returns to keep more sales.
Accelerated trends that will last
What does the future look like, according to retailers?
Online shopping. Consumers had to shop online when stores closed this spring, and retailers predict that the increase in eCommerce is the trend most likely to stick going forward.
Curbside pickup. As retailers adjust their omnichannel strategies for the next normal, they’re focused on giving shoppers what they want – a convenient way to get their items on-demand.
Read more results from our informal pulse survey in our blog “Retailers share how their omnichannel strategy has changed during Covid-19 and beyond.”
Caitlin Roberson
VP of Marketing
Caitlin Roberson is the Vice President of Marketing at Happy Returns. Previously, she served as Director of Enterprise Marketing at Lyft and Partner at top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Before that, she started and sold a content marketing agency.
