Leveling up your customer journey with retail ecommerce

We all know the saying “the customer is always right.”

In today’s post-pandemic consumer landscape, not only is the customer always right, they’re also omnichannel and intentional (and maybe a little impatient when it comes to their purchasing journeys). 

For CPG brands selling at retail, meeting your consumers wherever they prefer to shop isn’t a perk - it’s table stakes.  

Your omnichannel customers have high standards. Displaying a store locator on your website with issues like inaccurate inventory data or an inability to connect to specific retailers results in poor shopper experiences, including lost sales. 

So, how can your brand prevent these obstructions and not only meet, but exceed the expectations of the modern customer?

1. Understand your shoppers’ preferences‍

Nearly 70% of consumers participate in omnichannel shopping. 59% of consumers today say they’re likely to first browse online and then buy in-store. 54% are likely to look at a product in store and then buy online. Over the past two years, the number of people using online searches to find nearby retail locations tripled. 

A successful omnichannel strategy eliminates the divide between online and in-store experiences, providing seamless journeys to every in-stock retailer. It gives your customers options on how they prefer to purchase, whether it’s buying online and picking up in-store (BOPIS), click-and-collect via curbside pickup, purchasing online and shipping to their home, or knowing that the product they’re viewing on your site will be available if they choose to purchase directly in-store at their local retailer.

Omnichannel brands looking to support every buying preference need a comprehensive retail ecommerce platform. This is where Pear Commerce comes in.

Pear’s platform connects CPG brands to their retail partners’ digital carts with personalized, dynamic, accurate, and seamless paths to purchase.‍

2. Remove basic - and preventable - roadblocks

‍Having a store locator on your site or retail ecommerce options on your product detail pages is one thing, but making sure the tools are accurate and shoppable is another.

Nothing loses a sale faster than sending a customer to a retail location or link that’s actually out of stock. Best-in-class CPGs leverage shoppable tools that can ensure:

• Up-to-date inventory
  “Up-to-date” means daily inventory scanning across all retailers - not every two (or more) weeks from point of sale data.
  
• Paths to purchase to all of their retailers
  “All” means more than Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Kroger - it includes the local co-ops and regional grocery stores where shopper loyalty often lives.

Pear's proprietary technology scans inventory daily (in the slowest case) at 3,000+ retailers across 165,000+ locations in the US and Canada - 60x the reach of the industry standard. With Pear, your brand can create accurate and frictionless add-to-cart experiences down to the local level directly from your shoppable tools.

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3. Reduce the number of clicks

Regarding the aforementioned patience levels of today’s customers…

Every additional click in the retail ecommerce funnel results in a 95% drop off. If your retail ecommerce experiences require two clicks to navigate through a landing page and add products to a retailer's cart, you've already lost over 99% of your audience.

In order to win over and keep the loyalty of your shoppers, your brand must cut down the number of clicks it takes to purchase a product. Enabling one-click customer journeys with accurate inventory at all digital shelves is key.

Shoppable tools, like Pear’s Shoppable PDPs or Pear Connect, reduce the path to purchase from your onsite experiences or offsite paid media to retailer.com down to a single click.

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Benefits beyond the customer

Pear’s suite of tools is fully shoppable to 165,000+ retail locations, which makes retail-level shopper behavior data trackable. With Pear’s insights dashboard, your brand can understand which retailer, platform and audience is driving actual sales, in real-time. 

Sending traffic through Pear’s infrastructure builds top-, middle-, and bottom-of-funnel audiences of high-intent shoppers across any and all ad platforms, which your team can then access and use to optimize future marketing campaigns and expand your customer base (with zero additional fees). 

Unlock the power of retail ecommerce with a platform that does it all. Build a unified and leveled up customer experience for your brand with Pear. →