You cannot carry out your online sales with just one route if you own an online store. You must come up with better ideas to improve your retail resilience. The best way of doing that is to choose the best pick-up location for your business and keep your revenue afloat. With this approach, your customers will not just look at the new inventions of your eCommerce store. They will focus on building for the long term. If you can give your customers multiple ways to purchase products online, it will only make your business look more credible.
What is a Local Pickup?
If you have technical expertise in today’s eCommerce world, you must know what local pick ups are. A local pickup is defined as an alternative plan to the transaction options that can occur within the exact location. Once you have a specific product picking facility, you can instruct your customers to make purchases online. They will be able to carry their products from local pickups, minimizing their shipping costs. This is a thoughtful approach as it will attract new customers to your platform and give a boost to your online sales.
By having an appropriate pickup location, you can improve your online store's reputation, and most importantly, you won’t have anything to lose. For example, if you integrate another fulfillment option as part of your online store, it won’t be your best decision. Eventually, it will result in your customers taking a lot of time to complete the checkout procedure. If there is some problem within the communication panel with clients, it could negatively affect your feedback panel.
Factors While Creating a Local Pickup
1) Objectives
A mission statement defines the goals and objectives of your business, encompassing even our fulfillment process. When you are deciding on your local pickup facility, you must first finalize your services and features, and how it relates to your mission statement. Being the online store owner, you shouldn’t hesitate in providing information to the customers. For example, when you decide on where to pick up, your customers must have an idea about that location and the facility you are specifying.
Strikingly allows its users to organize content for the “about us” section and mission statement. In these sections, you can include all the relevant content regarding the highs and lows of your business. You can also tell the audience about the targets you want to achieve as a businessman. Once the customers know what to expect from an eCommerce website, they will find it easy to make buying decisions.
2) Communication
The number of people coming to your product pickup facility highly depends on your business website's customer satisfaction score. When you provide the local pickup option to your customers, communication is the most integral concept to determine its success. You must provide your customers with all the required shipping information as a business owner. Most importantly, you should know what type of customers you are up against. For example, some want to complete a purchase and leave your website, whereas some would like to go through your blog section.
You must communicate with all types of customers and ensure that you don’t give out the wrong information. If your data doesn’t have any authenticity, don’t expect any positive reviews from them on your testimonial page. Positive customer feedback is essential for a healthy conversion rate and attracting worldwide audiences to a website. When you create your pickup facility, you must inform your customers about it and make sure that their overall schedule doesn’t get disturbed.
3) Hiring
In the world of eCommerce, there are so many tasks going on that you cannot do everything on your own. One of the things you would require help with is managing your local pickup facility. If you put so much burden on yourself, you will not be able to execute even a single eCommerce task effectively. This is where a healthy recruitment strategy is needed for the proper functioning of your business.
As a business owner, you must fully control the hiring conducted as part of your business plan. You should hire trustworthy people who maintain transparency within your business operations.
4) Technology
In today’s eCommerce world, you must always focus on providing multiple options to customers while establishing a local pickup facility. Gone are the days when you had to rely on one payment option to carry out the checkout process. With the evolution of website builders such as Strikingly, business owners can give multiple payment options to their customers. Strikingly ensures that customers convert the payment according to their currency before submitting it. Payment is the most common payment option used by customers on a Strikingly website.
Apart from that, Strikingly provides its users with an order management system. It helps track the delivered products' purposes, giving customers an idea of where to pick up. Order management system on Strikingly makes you and your customers aware of the delivered product. Once the product is delivered, the notification arrives on this feature, and the customer will let the business owner know about the product status.
Creating a Product Pickup on Strikingly
Strikingly is a free website builder that enables users to build an exquisite business website with innovative website features. We provide our users with a compilation of quality website templates, which they can customize according to their business plans. Once they have created a quality website design, they can start adding all the products, navigation, and other forms of content to their business website.
Once you are done with the making of your business website, you can include the product pickup option by going through the following steps:
- Select “Shipping” from the “Store” option on the Strikingly website editor.
- Click on “Add Shipping Option.”
- Select your preferred shipping rule and fill out all the important fields regarding region and rates. Don’t forget to click on the “Save” option.
Once you have added all your eCommerce products to your online store, you can go through these steps.
Advantages of Local Pickup
If you consider many online businesses worldwide, you will realize that a pick-up location could have both advantages and disadvantages. However, there are more good things on the plate rather than bad ones. The biggest advantage of the local pickup facility is that your products get delivered fairly quickly. The customers can check out their purchased products without having to deal with the shipping costs. Once you make your customers aware of the status of their purchased product, you can attain trust badges from them.
If you are receiving products at a quicker rate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the delivered products will be in perfect condition. In some cases, the delivered products are either damaged or get stolen, which harms the credibility of the businessmen. The best thing about the local pick-ups is that there is no chance that the received product is in a damaged condition. This minimizes all the potential shipping-related issues and increases customer satisfaction.
Disadvantages of Local Pickup
Despite the positives a local pickup facility has, you must also understand the drawbacks that it brings to the table. If you have a product pickup facility as part of your online store, it may raise customer expectations. It is a good thing because you would like to have the highest standards for your website. However, if there are a few flaws within your business operations, it may not make them satisfied.
For example, if a customer wants a product next to his doorstep within 15 minutes and you have taken 10 minutes longer for some reason, he would not be happy. Therefore, the high expectations may reduce the margin for error as far as your business operations are concerned.
Conclusion
The local pickup feature was created to protect the customers and has been in the market for a long time. However, it has become a massive marketing trend after the COVID-19 pandemic. According to numerous customers worldwide, they want an appropriate pick up location that can help them in completing the product purchase.
A quality pick-up facility doesn’t just improve your online sales, it also brings credibility to your business vision. Just like is the case with so many sectors around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has made businessmen resilient. So, without wasting any further time, build a fully-functional online store on Strikingly and make sure that your customers get to their desired products within no time.
