Pawn shops are one of the world’s oldest businesses. From time immemorial, people have always turned to pawn shops when they are in a financially difficult situation. Pawn shops serve an important role in the economy, by injecting money into the hands of people, giving them the capital they need to start their businesses or meet an essential expenditure.
Digitize your pawn shop
Most pawn shops offer two options of getting money out of valuable objects. One is to use the object as collateral to get paid, and later redeem it back by paying the principal and interest. The second option is to sell the object, which will in turn be resold by the pawnbroker. Whatever be the choice, the new-age customers prefer to mail the artifact and get the transaction done via pawn shop websites. Physically coming down to the pawn shop to sell an object is losing its charm.
The good news for pawn shop owners is that you can now build your pawn shop website within 30 minutes on Strikingly. With a minimum investment of time to design and maintain your pawn shop website, you can equip yourself with the best digital platform that your business needs.
When you have an online pawn shop, marketing resale articles becomes easy. When someone needs to buy a vintage artifact or a second-hand appliance, the first place they look is the internet. Your pawn shop website will get you noticed by your potential customers. Once you have a digital presence through your pawn shop website, you can also advertise your pawn shop online sale on social media and search engines.
How to build a killer pawn shop website?
All the best online pawn shops around here have some common sections that make them customers’ favorites. Strikingly provides all those sections for free and lets you enter the online business with zero cost. Let us look at those sections one by one.
- Online store
An online store is central to the business of an online pawn shop. People should be able to easily peruse the object listed on the portal. You can build your pawn shops online store with Strikingly, by just entering the details of your products such as the product name, description, image, price, etc. Strikingly offers payment gateway integration with all the leading modes of payment such as PayPal, Stripe, Alipay, and WeChat.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website.
- Clear navigation
As a pawn shop, your business provides multiple services to people such as extending loans on collateral, evaluating, buying, and selling artifacts. A user who enters your pawn shop website may have come for any of these services. The navigation should be intuitive enough to make it easy for the user to get to his required section/page quickly.
Listing all the sections of your website in the top or left side navigation bar is the industry’s standard, and most users would be familiar with it. Since you have multiple options under your ‘Services’ section, you can keep the navigation bar tidy with the help of dropdown menus.
- FAQ
Whenever people are handling money matters, they get a lot of queries regarding how the system works, the interest rates, payment methods, evaluation criteria for the collateral objects, etc. To make the process easy for the user, and to build his trust, you must include a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section on your pawn shop website.
Certain things that you may think as obvious might be a piece of complex information for a new user. For example, for a customer who is planning to take a loan for the first time, it may take a while to get his head around the interest calculation. Detailing such information on the FAQ page will help the customer to gain clarity and confidence in you.
- Blog
A blog is such a tool that can add value to any type of website, owing to its contribution to improving the SEO ranking of your website. Launching a pawn shop website doesn’t mean that you will be getting online business opportunities automatically. You need to take an effort to get the link of your pawn shop on page 1 of the search results. Though there are paid ways to promote your website, it is short-lived and not cost-effective. The best way is to increase your site traffic organically through SEO techniques like blogging.
When a user searches for the keyword ‘pawn online’, the search engine lists all websites with that keyword. The more times you have the keyword on your page, the higher will be your rank. Bonus points if you have the keyword on your URL. All these can be achieved through blog articles. Write about any topic that is relevant to your business and post at least one article a week. You can easily implement this by using Strikingly’s blog section. You can write your articles in advance and schedule the publication for later. You can also customize your blog URL to improve your SEO rank.
- Contact information
A pawn shop website should have multiple contact options such as email, phone number, contact form, etc. You can even include the latest communication modes such as video calling options. This will help you to look at the artifact the customer wants to sell. Include your full postal address for customers to mail the objects to you. It will help if you add a Google map section showing the location of your shop. In the case of delicate objects, customers may prefer to come down to your shop in person and the map will help them in finding your brick-and-mortar store easily.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website.
Tips to boost a pawn shop website’s business
You may have been in the pawn shop business for decades and know the ins and outs of the game. But, when it comes to doing business online, it is a totally different ballgame. You need to revise your marketing strategy according to the tech-savvy customers. Here are some tips that you can follow on your pawn shop website to get more traffic and improve conversion.
- Targeted promotion
To improve the conversion rate of your website, you need to follow advanced marketing strategies like STP. Customer segmentation will help you in identifying the specific needs of different customer groups. Analyze and decide which customer group will generate the maximum business for you, and focus your promotional efforts towards that segment. Keep your promotional content consistent in all communication channels such as websites, social media, and even printed brochures that you may use in your physical store.
- Scheduled offers
People are more likely to sell or buy stuff at certain times of the year. For example, a lot of people want to get rid of things they haven't used in a while, during their spring cleaning every year. Identify such occasions in advance, and start your campaign before a week or month. Your brand name should be fresh in people’s memory when they want to sell or buy something. This will encourage people to make use of your pawn shop online selling portal to monetize things that they no longer need.
- Social media
When it comes to online business, you cannot afford to ignore the power of social media. You need to be active on popular social media platforms to capture your potential customer’s attention. If you are selling rare and valuable artifacts, then an Instagram presence is a must. You can also explore other options such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.
- Wide product range
Though it is nice to have a niche for your business, don’t restrict your opportunities by choosing a niche that is too narrow. For example, if you deal with only silver and gold artifacts, your customer base will be very small. You can include other valuable items such as electronic appliances, vintage collections, limited edition books, etc. In recent times, people are trading even video games and costumes on the internet.
- Evaluation criteria
Transparency is a big game-changer in any online business. Thanks to a ton of information available on the internet, today’s customers are more aware. For each category of artifacts that you deal with, list down the evaluation criteria and standards. Get the details from reputed professionals in each category of artifacts. You can even list the experts’ profiles on your pawn shop website as your consultants. These small things will help you in building trust and gaining customer loyalty.
- Multilingual website
If you are dealing with exotic artifacts, then you may source your objects from customers based all around the world. In such a business, multilingual pawn shop websites are mandatory. For example, if you want to source ancient Chinese porcelain ware, you need a website in the Mandarin language.
Pawn shop websites on Strikingly
Pawn shop online business is a combination of finance and e-commerce. Most businesses who host their pawn stores online offer multiple services and require a suite of sections and pages to accommodate all the business use cases. To build such a composite website like this from scratch will be heavy on your budget.
Strikingly offers you a simple to use free website builder which will help you drag and drop any section that you want. We offer several ready-made templates that will get you bootstrapped in your website building exercise. To get some inspiration, you can check out some pawn shop website examples hosted on Strikingly.
- Ackermann pawn shop
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website.
- Citadel Coins
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website.
Once you have chosen the template and design, you can build the whole website on your own, without having to take any expert help. If you are stuck anywhere, our support team is at your service 24/7
