When brands are looking to get started with retail ecommerce, the very first thing we tell them to do is:

Make everything shoppable to retail.

But what does “everything” really mean? And what does “shoppable” really mean?

Let’s get into it. 

“Everything” means any of your onsite or offsite experiences that are clickable. 

This includes anything that exists on brand.com, like your where-to-buy tools (i.e. store locator), product detail pages (PDPs), recipes, blogs, and promotions or incentives, in addition to your offsite experiences. 

Depending on your brand’s marketing strategy, these offsite experiences can include: organic social posts, paid social ads, paid search ads, display ads, emails, SMS, videos, influencer campaigns, and more. Offsite experiences also include your customer service responses on social or in emails. Remember: if it’s clickable, it can be made shoppable. 

“Shoppable” means creating a digital path to find and purchase your products at retail. 

Enabling true shoppability involves two key factors:

1) Connecting to all of your retail partners, including local retailers.

2) Only displaying the stores where your product is in-stock and available to purchase, based on inventory data and geography. 

Making your onsite or offsite experiences shoppable to a handful of retailers can be done by hard coding links directly to the retailers’ PDPs. But making everything shoppable across all of your retail partners in every zip (while maintaining accurate inventory data to avoid customer frustration) is a massive, likely impossible, undertaking for a brand. 

Effectively doing so requires a retail ecommerce platform, like Pear Commerce, that automatically scans inventory daily to create digital paths to purchase across 3,000+ retailers from your shoppable experiences. This gives your brand the ability to confidently connect any UPC to every available retailer’s digital shelf, without ever worrying about sending your customers to out-of-stock locations or links.

Once you’ve made everything shoppable, the true power of your retail ecommerce channel is unlocked. 

Next, check out how one brand partnered with Pear to use data and insights to optimize it:   

How one brand used data & actionable insights to run their retail ecommerce strategy