Online Ecommerce Stores For Salons
2019 was going to be the year of eCommerce and to a large extent it was, but then 2020 happened, then it really was the year of e-commerce. Literally overnight businesses that hadn’t even considered selling products online suddenly started to embrace it, all because we were in lockdown and we couldn’t sell to anyone in person, no matter how much we wanted to, we couldn’t, so everyone piled into developing online shopping.
Online Buying Habits Are Changing
But just because we have come out of lock down doesn’t mean you’re too late to the party, far from it. Many experts have gone on record to say that Covid and the actions governments around the world have taken has accelerated our online buying habits by as much as 5 years. Just imagine that, in a matter of months we as a race have changed our habits to accommodate our needs.
So if you want to expand your business online and get some additional sales, ecommerce is the way to go.
There are a number of ways you can implement an ecommerce platform into your business, as either a stand a lone store or as part of your existing site. I would as far as possible have it associated with your site as that will provide brand consistency, as well as the opportunity to cross promote your onsite services too.
As with anything, ecom comes with pros and cons which are wise to consider:
Pros:
- Opportunity to increase retail sales
- Customers can buy at any time
- System will take of everything without you having to worry about it
- Automatically take payments through credit cards
- You can have other people check orders and fulfil
- It’s a great way to build up other assets such as an email list which can be used to promote your full service.
Cons:
- Has to be created
- Look after stock levels
- Content still needs to be produced for the store such as descriptions and images
- Just because you have an online store doesn’t mean people can find It or use it.
- More products can affect server performance
However, it’s not a utopia either, and certainly isn’t a magic bullet, some clients think that all the have to do is to knock up a store online and people will flock to the store and buy. However an online store operates like any other website in that the store needs to be promoted so people can find it and buy from it.
More Scrutiny
One of the biggest things you have to be aware of is that being online with an eCommerce platform opens your prices up to more scrutiny, if you are selling the same things as everyone else.
So it will be very difficult to sell a commodity item available to lots of beauty businesses in your store at significantly inflated prices and expect people to buy, unless the customer base is particularly loyal to your brand.
With so much online, a shopper can more easily compare your price against anyone else over the internet, that is why it’s so important to be a little different and include items which are not considered commodities.
By the same token, if you find that you can sell a product at a significant discount and still make a profit, then it could work in your favour, though, even with this you have to be careful as it makes it easy for anyone to compete at a similar price and start a pricing war, which is good for nobody.
Regardless of what you might be thinking, the general direction of travel is for more and more internet based shops being available, and that more of your competitors are likely to have them, which ultimately will help your marketing efforts in the long run, so it’s definitely worth thinking about.
