Your store locator doesn’t have to suck

Obvious newsflash: customers want multiple ways to shop. Online ordering, curbside pickup, and purchasing directly from a retailer are all options on the table now, and meeting the omnichannel demands of the modern shopper means brands need to support each method in the most useful, convenient, and accurate way.

In other words, as consumers, we want our cake and we want to eat it too. But now we also want to know exactly where we can buy the cake locally (preferably with multiple retailer options so we can choose the most convenient one). If there’s a click-and-collect or ship-to-home option available, that would be great, too.

Many CPG brands leverage store locators to help their customers find their products. Up until now, however, these store locators have caused more headaches than added value for both shoppers and brands:

1. ‍Old data - The inventory data available for store locators is typically a couple of weeks old - at minimum - and is based on retailers’ point-of-sale (POS) data. Therefore, if a product is rung up at a register within the last couple of weeks, the item could still show up as in-stock at that location. This results in customer frustration when arriving at a retail store and attempting to purchase (read: loss of sales). This also requires dedicating internal resources toward manually managing inventory and maintaining an accurate store locator.
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2. Changing inventory - Retailers carrying a brand’s products change rapidly, particularly when third-party distributors are involved. Brands working with distributors may not be aware of the full list of locations currently stocking their products, which adds a layer of complexity to managing a store locator tool. This means more human intervention to constantly monitor and update the retailers listed on the store locator.
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3. Lack of insights - Early iterations of store locators informed customers where they could buy products, but provided minimal benefit beyond that. They weren’t shoppable, didn’t return any data, and were often managed by customer service teams due to the number of complaints stemming from incorrect information.

Having a store locator on their website checked a box for brands, but didn’t give shoppers the opportunity to take action and actually make a purchase from the page. In turn, these store locators captured zero insights into who was shopping or how they were engaging with the store locator to find and buy a product. Driving traffic to a store locator page was essentially a path to nowhere, offering little convenience to customers in terms of shoppability, and little to no data for marketing teams to understand their audiences and make future campaign optimizations.

Pear Commerce addresses each of these pain points, offering a shoppable store locator with up-to-date inventory display and actionable insights.

With Pear’s store locator, CPG brands have an opportunity to provide the best possible experience for shoppers, displaying preferred, stocked-up retailers nearby (with an option to add directly to their carts and purchase!), while collecting data from consumer actions to inform future marketing decisions.

Here’s how it works:

Pear adds dynamic shoppability to store locators, connecting your products to every available retail ecommerce cart automatically.

To get started, provide Pear with a list of UPCs. Our tech will do the rest. We scan over 3,000 retailers, collecting inventory data for your products at every available location. Other tools rely on inventory data that is two or more weeks old (at best). Pear’s data is updated every 24 hours (at the slowest).

After implementing the store locator widget on your site, customers are able to view which of your products are currently in-stock at their local retailers via geolocation. Out-of-stock items will never appear available for purchase, completely eliminating the opportunity for customer frustration.

View this feature in action at Liquid Death and Perdue Farms (select “Where to Buy”)!

Pear’s store locator provides a streamlined and intuitive user experience that’s far more advanced than standard where-to-buy tools. Shoppers can filter by the specific products they’re searching for or the store they’d like to purchase from, putting them in the driver seat of their retail ecomm shopping experience. Visible “Add to Cart” buttons on each product provide a clear path to payment, eliminating purchase paralysis or drop-off.

Unlike competitors, all of Pear’s retail partners are accessible and shoppable through the store locator (with no extra charge for individual retailers). Minimal clicks create a seamless customer shopping experience, converting impulse add-to-carts into conversions.‍

Pear returns full-funnel, attributable insights.

Your Pear dashboard reports at the top of the funnel all the way down to the conversion level, providing you with real-time actionable data. From page loads to individual transactions, you can easily track retail ecommerce performance and shopper insights that were previously only attainable for direct-to-consumer brands.

By providing you with UPC and individual purchase level data, you’ll be able to unlock and measure the effectiveness of your inbound traffic in a way that was never possible until now.‍

Pear integrates with your marketing platforms to optimize and automatically improve your ads.

Your team can now make performance marketing campaign optimizations by leveraging the full-funnel data returned from your Pear store locator.

Creating custom audiences from site visitors, mid-funnel shoppers adding to cart, and purchasers enables targeting of shoppers most likely to buy your products through retail ecommerce. The data returned from your store locator is automatically sent to any ad platform you choose for optimizations on future marketing campaigns.

Connect with Pear to learn how your brand can eliminate manual updates on your store locator, improve your customers’ shopping experience with real-time inventory data, and use your store locator’s actionable insights for accelerated retail ecommerce growth.

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