How to get more sales for online shoe stores using omnichannel retailing?
Running shoe stores, offline or online shoe stores, is no mean feat as it is a very demanding business. You have to deal with many challenges, including keeping your customers interested, introducing trending designs, attractive pricing, ensuring a great shopping experience, and keeping your loyal customer base intact. If you are still using a traditional selling approach, your work gets tougher as shoppers are becoming more demanding every day. But don't lose hope. Using omnichannel retailing, you can overcome these challenges and grow your online shoe business.
The traditional way of selling/purchasing shoes
You walk into a shop, pick a shoe brand per your size, and then wait for the salesperson to finish with other customers before engaging with you. Then you tell him your feet size, and the salesperson will try his best to get the shoe that suits your feet.
On the seller’s side, retailers had to start with a physical store to expand the shoe brand’s presence in prominent locations to serve the customers and win their loyalty. Only then can they think of growing business on other influential channels like eCommerce websites, marketplaces, and social media channels to serve national and international customers.
This has been the traditional way of selling shoes worldwide for a long time now.
The new way of selling/purchasing shoes
Now customer shopping habits have started to shift substantially. They utilize search engines to identify a brand store in their neighbourhood and visit the showroom to try on the shoe and confirm their size, colour, fit, and cost. They would then use their smartphones at the retail store to compare the product pricing on brand apps, online marketplaces, and online stores to discover the best deal with attractive discounts and faster purchasing options. Once they decide, they place an order for the product at the channel with the best price and quickest delivery option.
As one can see, there is a drastic change in customer behaviour due to the availability of numerous shopping channels apart from a physical store. They intelligently use a mix and match strategy for online & offline shopping.
It's no secret that consumers want it all, and they expect to shop across multiple channels and devices, quickly accessing what they need when they need it. Footwear brands must create a seamless shopping experience on every touchpoint to meet high consumer expectations.
Different shoe brands are actively using the omnichannel retailing strategy to grow their business and brand influence phenomenally. Some of these well-known brands are:
STEVE MADDEN
Steve Madden is America’s hottest footwear brand for men and women. Steve Madden stores in India were losing a high volume of in-store sales due to critical issues like technical glitches in payment or placing orders, difficulty in searching for products, and tracking orders.
This premium shoe brand has revolutionized how customers discover and shop for their products. The brand is actively employing the Fynd Store app (in-store assistive sales solution) as a digital catalog for customers to browse and shop, as well as a means of plugging technical and marketing gaps in daily business.
Steve Madden consumers no longer have to leave the store empty-handed if they do not get shoes of their preference immediately. Fynd’s in-store omnichannel solution helps in finding the preferred product by the customer, thereby fulfilling the order and delivering it directly to their home, even when the product is unavailable offline.
The integration of the Fynd Store app in Steve Madden stores pan-India has been an enormous success, generating 8% incremental sales, 99% catalog coverage, and 8%-12% saved purchases.
RUOSH
Ruosh is a leading premium footwear brand headquartered in Bangalore. With 35 company-owned stores across 13 cities, the brand has rapidly expanded its presence through key account channels & has 300+ points of sale (POS), including all leading Indian E-Commerce portals.
Previously, Ruosh used multiple order management systems (OMS) for individual business accounts at Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, and Tata CLiQ to promote their brand. For staff who worked in-store, the experience was extremely challenging because they had to manage orders from each of these business accounts separately that included dealing with a number of point of contacts from each marketplace, and fulfilling and managing orders for each of these channels. It was time-consuming and complicated inventory management.
Ruosh has saved significant time, money, and resources by shifting to Fynd Platform which acts as a coordinator and mediator for order management from all marketplaces. The brand actively utilizes Fynd’s centralized Order Management System (OMS) that seamlessly accepts, tracks, manages, and delivers orders from online and offline channels.
Ruosh has achieved some remarkable accomplishments over the last year—it now has 35 Fynd-powered stores, a 300% increase in omnichannel sales, and contributes one crore monthly online sales.
The other most popular shoe brands that are utilizing the Fynd Store omnichannel solution are Red Chief, Fila, Clarks, Aldo.
Fynd—the complete omnichannel solution platform
Fynd is India's largest omnichannel platform, having assisted over 1000 retailers and 10,000 stores in growing and generating new revenue streams.
Shoe stores can actively utilize Fynd omnichannel solutions to grow their offline & online shoe business. Here is how it can help them:
Fynd Store app
The Fynd Store app is a digital representation of in-store brands. It empowers users to explore, scan, find, compare, share, and purchase using endless aisle solutions that store employees can use to transform the customer shopping experience.
The endless aisle ensures customers get a single-view inventory of the brand that can fulfill customer demands from any store location across India, assuring 100% order fulfillment and a tremendous boost in sales.
Fynd Store's new upgrades including easy returns, home shopping, personalised carts—making it even more relevant for retailers to create a secure and connected shopping experience for their customers.
Contactless browsing with QR Code
Post-pandemic many customers were sceptical to use the in-store tablet for browsing products. With theFynd Store app, store managers can leverage the app's QR code sharing feature to help them browse numerous products from their own smartphones or mobile devices.
The store can also print the QR code and stick it on the store or product category walls. This easy-to-use feature doubles a brand store's size by allowing customers to view available merchandise in any of the brand's other stores across the country.
To make things even better, contactless browsing can transform into contactless billing. After adding the product to the wishlist, customers can pay the order amount through flexible contactless payment options within the Fynd Store application.
Lotto India aggressively utilizes Fynd's contactless browsing feature, enabling clients to shop around the clock, regardless of regular shop hours.
Order Management
Fynd's robust Order Management System / OMS helps brands track & manage orders originating from different sales channels & marketplaces. A single dashboard gives a detailed overview of recent orders, the last six month's orders, with separate tabs showing precise detail of new orders, processing orders, processed orders, and the concerned sales channel from where they received those orders. It has helped brands like Fila to streamline their operational processes as it puts the delayed orders under highlight and needful escalations and interventions improves the SLAs.
These features from Fynd have been designed to solve everyday business problems for offline & online shoe stores, starting from products going out-of-stock, lesser footfalls in store, streamlining product exchange, delivery, catalog management, inventory management, logistic management, and a lot more.
Fynd is a complete omnichannel solution that is tailored to meet the specific needs of retail business across categories including online shoe stores, apparel brands, home and living, beauty, jewelry & accessories and electronics. You name the business problem, and we have a solution for you.
Conclusion
By now, you should have a better understanding of how numerous shoe brands are leveraging omnichannel retailing to build their businesses. Connect with us, and our experts will show you how to grow your shoe store business, and outperform the competition through omnichannel retailing strategy.