How Much Does eCommerce Affect Brick and Mortar?
-
Is there any way to quantify how an eCommerce site affects its respective brick and mortar store? I can show the owner of a brick and mortar store how much sales we did last week, month and year. However, I can't show him what it did for his brick and mortar store. What do I do? I want to claim credit for as much gravy as I can! Thanks.
-
Same thing happened to Zuckerberg.....
-
I am working on it as we speak. Funny, after I wrote that last night it became one of those thoughts that will not leeeaaavvveeee.
Best
-
Thanks to the both of you for the excellent feedback. There's a lot of strong suggestions here to dig into. Off I go!
P.S. Robert, if there's an app or something for texting address and phone numbers with a click, please share.
See ya on the threads.
-
Keri brings up a good point here. For me, when I am in my office and someone comes in and says we need a ....... (which always ends in some new or improved technology piece), If we are mid project, I like being able to go to one vendor who has both eComm and B&M because I can peruse, see inventory, and purchase for pickup. The purchase for pickup is great as it is guaranteed to be on the counter in 30 min or less and, I do not have to stand in the interminable line.... Impatient I am.
If that retailer needs proof of eCommerce impact, they just have to look at that. Remember, these products could have been bought online. Secondarily, I do not prefer locations that do not have eComm sites or sites that have a thorough description of their offerings in a retail location. To me, today, eCommerce saves me money....especially with retail in the store purchases because it saves me time.
-
Maybe also look at the visitors by location in your Google Analytics, and show increases in visitors who are from the areas where you have physical stores?
I'm betting with some searching you can find some more ideas of how to help tie in the website to in-store sales, like promotion codes from the website if you order in store.
What about even a customer service initiative where you could order online and have it ready for pickup at the store?
-
AWC this is a good question and I started writing then decided to take a breather and came back as I just did not see a clear answer. I leaned toward what Keri had in that if you saw traffic exiting from the contact page or the map or store location page, that would at least provide a clue. If you track back and say that these people were looking at umbrellas, did you see a corresponding increase in umbrellas? But, the traffic is likely more diffuse in terms of products. The exit page does seem to hold a clue though.
However, you might be better served to design a test that would give you more data. So, is there a way to look at items that are more often purchased locally than shipped? Say an item that is more time is of the essence? An example for me would be tarps after a bad storm? Items associated with weather? Items that repair vital equipment (like your car or lawn mower or a plunger). If you see searches for generators after the lights go out in an area and it is unknown when they will be back, are you seeing searches to the eComm site and then purchases in the retail store after exits? For plumbing supplies do you see searches on plungers, augers, etc. and then exits without purchasing? Can you in any way correlate that with local purchases? I would even look at having something on the site like "Press here to text our address and phone to your cell phone" (Gosh that is so good I may have to adopt it!!).
Hope this helps, wish it were imminently more definitive.
Best
-
I'm looking forward to seeing the answers on this one. There's not going to be a simple answer that will cover everything, that's for sure.
This summer I went on a vacation with my parents, and used the "simple" purchase of a pair of hiking boots to show him some of the complexities of measurement. In Montana and North Dakota I saw billboards for a sporting goods chain (that I hadn't heard of before). In the campground in South Dakota we picked up a "welcome to Sioux City" brochure that mentioned this same chain. When we were at breakfast, I looked up the chain on my mobile phone to see what the hours were and the store location. I found out that it opened early and was only a couple of miles away, so we went there and got hiking boots for my dad from the brick and mortar store after he tried them on. So, which channel gets the credit for that sale, and how much credit should each channel get?
Things I can think of that can lead to correlations that may help your cause. Look at sales volume and look at visits to your site, and see if there's a correlation. What about visits to the store locator page? Searches that include intent regarding address, hours, etc?
Are there any products where someone would likely search for them online then buy them in person, because of the cost of shipping or needing them right away or the fact that you don't ship them? Look at visits to those pages and look at any corresponding increase in B&M sales for those products.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
50 nofollow outbound links is too much?
Hello, I was reading that having many nofollow outbound links is bad for SEO. Could somebody give me an idea how many is "many"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabx0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
How to optimize an ecommerce catalog that uses parameters only
Hello ! I am facing a problem concerning a client's website that has been developped using filters that create parameters - there are no categories. This means that, no matter what I choose as a filter, the page title, desc and my H1 stays the same. In a beautiful, unicorn rainbow filled world - I could just tell them to restructure their site with new categories/sub categories AND with filters. For SEO purposes and to find a temporary solution until we can change the architecture, what would be the best choice? Should we create individual pages that serves the same content as the catalog, but with rewritten URL, Title, Description and canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
ie: http:/domain.com/catalog/?brand=moz canonical to http:/domain.com/catalog/brand/moz ? I noticed indeed.com does that (https://ca.indeed.com/SEO-Specialist-jobs vs https://ca.indeed.com/jobs?q=SEO+Specialist&l=) Should we dynamise the content depending on which filters has been selected? Of course, some filters are real filters that wouldn't attract or add any value (such as order by) Thanks for your input!0 -
A PDF with a good quality external link could affect the authority of that domain?
Here I go with a situation: You have an isolated PDF hosted in your domain, the PDF has none internal backlinks (neither links to another page on the domain) but has a really good external backlink from a domain with high authority. Do you think that the backlink has influence on the global domain authority and the domain rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | overalia0 -
Menu Structure for Large Ecommerce
Hi We have a large ecommerce site, the menu at the moment is limited by the amount of categories we can display. As our site is so large, the menu at the moment only has the top categories and their immediate subcategories, however we have level 3's which go deeper, as there is such a large range. At the moment, they;re not in the top menu, but I want to put a case forward to say why we should include them - I am however mindful of a menu not being overcrowded with hundreds of links. Has anyone had a similar experience of this? Or a case study on how adding important categories to the menu helped improve things? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Brand traffic moved from organic to PPC - could it affect rankings?
Hi, We've just increased a lot of branded PPC clicks for one of our clients. I've worked out that roughly 5000 clicks per month has been moved from organic search to PPC (all brand related search queries). These clicks are very cheap, but the client has expressed worries about what these clicks could do to our organic rankings. Lots of brand search in organic results proves to Google that this is a strong brand, right? So what happens when all the searches are still there, but the organic listings stop getting the clicks? Could this have a ring effect on other non-brand rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Urgent Help - Ecommerce URL best practice for SEO
Guys i need some urgent help here as we need to get this sorted out soon. We have a page similar to wayfair shop the look: www.wayfair.com/Shop-The-Look/ What are the best practices for URL structure if we applies 2-3 filters? Is wayfair style good for SEO? FYI: We create our crawlable, link friendly AJAX website using pushstate() but unsure of the structure for this case. We followed http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Link Location Still Making That Much Difference?
I got to thinking earlier... I know obviously footer links are always going to be the bottom of the barrel but does the rest of block level analysis still mean as much... I mean, everybody went nuts with getting in-content links only so there's a billion and one badly written spammy blogs with useless content on just for the sake of getting in-content links instead of blogroll/sidebar links. I just wonder if maybe due to that, things might have levelled out a bit for link location and we hadn't noticed... or at least there's not been much discussion over it lately. Thoughts anyone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0