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The brick and mortar store is in combat mode and that is set to continue as they vie for footfall and attention from customers who are swayed by the lure of online stores. Brick and mortar retail is very much alive and kicking though and it’s ready for a fight. One major advantageous element that brick and mortar stores have over their online counterparts is the face-to-face contact they have with their customers.

With so much choice available for customers in terms of where they purchase their goods, customer service has never been so important especially for offline retailers. Delighting every single customer that comes in the door of the store will help to encourage that customer to return to the store again and again because they had such a good experience. The key issue though is achieving excellent customer service and achieving it consistently

We hear so much today about social media and the many uses it has for growing a business. Is that restricted to those businesses that operate online? The answer is a definitive no especially if your business is a brick and mortar retail outlet(s). Social media is used by the masses and it is being utilized by practically all demographics therefore it’s something that brick and mortar retailers simply cannot ignore.

Customer returns are an inevitability in retail. People buy things, take them home and for various reasons, they will then decide to return them to the store they purchased them. While retailers likely hate dealing with returns, they need to have a policy in place that all staff understand in order to ensure it’s a streamlined process. If the returns process is not easy for the customer, you could be dealing with a bigger issue in the long term if they decide to vent their dissatisfaction at your levels of customer service to a wider audience.

Choosing a location for your commercial business is one of the primary decisions you’ll arrive at before you open your doors. You’ll of course want somewhere with high footfall potential which doesn’t have an astronomical rent rate and it is sometimes difficult to achieve both. You of course rely on healthy footfall especially as a B2C type of outlet. Some stores of course will be destination shops such as furniture stores and the like as people know and want to travel there and plan their journeys around that.

At Storetraffic, we are all about offline retail but there’s no mistaking the fact that the Internet has changed the retail landscape for brick and mortar (b & m) retailers as well as creating the new era of Ecommerce. Our business is built upon using reliable technologies to assist brick and mortar stores to use data from our people counting software to make better analytical decisions, the Internet and advanced technologies can also really bring stores along, but the caveat is that they need to know how to use it.

No matter how easy online shopping becomes, there’s one advantage traditional brick-and-mortar retailers have over online competitors that will never go away — the impulse buy. More than 80 percent of purchase decisions are still made in a physical store, and savvy retailers can harness the power of psychology to boost the “gotta have it” appeal of shoppers seeing something with their eyes and being able to drop it in their cart right then and there.

Consumer psychology is a major part of retail for store managers and planners. Psychology of the consumer really comes to play at store set up stage when deciding on a layout to maximize on the opportunity to sway consumer purchases in order for them to spend more dollars.

The retail industry is difficult and it is of course especially tough when starting out. That applies both for online and brick and mortar retailers. While returns from customers are inevitable in retail, they’re also something that needs to be examined before trading begins but the returns policy needs to be continually monitored to ensure that it is effective, that it is not damaging on customer service levels and that it is not leaking valuable revenue where possible.