You may not realize it, but your efforts to improve the shopping experience in your online store can help boost sales at the POS — and vice versa. That’s because many of your customers interact with your brand both ways, online and offline.
Below, we’ll explain this relationship in more detail: we’ll introduce the ROPO concept, show you how to make it more effective, and explain how the in-store shopping experience can also increase your online sales. Read on and discover one more opportunity to stand out from the competition!
The ROPO concept
ROPO stands for research online, purchase offline. In other words, ROPO describes the process in which consumers research a product online and, instead of buying it from an online store, head to a physical store to purchase it.
Several factors can drive this behavior: consumers may prefer to try out different options before deciding to buy — as with cosmetics or clothing — or their need for the product may be more urgent than online stores’ delivery times allow.
Whatever the reason, ROPO points to opportunities to promote your brand that you may not be taking advantage of yet. With this consumer behavior in mind, your business’s online presence becomes even more important — preferably in the form of an online store. That way, search engine results become the missing invitation for a new customer to walk into your store.
What’s more, once shoppers are inside your store, it’s easier to engage them with a delightful shopping experience, encouraging them to buy more than just the products they were originally looking for. After all, impulse purchases are much more common at the POS than in online stores.
Ways to make ROPO more effective
Before improving the results of your digital strategy, it’s essential to think of objective ways to measure them. After all, how can you tell whether new initiatives have succeeded without reliable benchmarks for comparison?
Measuring the ROPO effect
Measuring the ROPO conversion rate is no simple task. To calculate it accurately, you would need to find the ratio between the number of consumers who looked up certain products in the online store and then went to the store to buy them, and the number of visitors who only checked out the product on the website.
Neither figure is easy to measure, since browsing is, in the vast majority of cases, anonymous — and not every store has an integrated customer registration system capable of linking an offline customer to a visit to the online store.
For this reason, more indirect strategies are used to measure the results of POS initiatives related to the ROPO conversion rate.
One of them is to split online store visits into two categories: those made by consumers who live within a 10 km radius of the store, and the rest, made by consumers who live at least 10 km away from the physical store. From there, you can measure the conversion rate for each type of visit.
By subtracting one rate from the other, you can estimate the impact of the ROPO effect on your store’s sales. For example, if the conversion rate for the first group is 2% and for the second is 1.3%, you can assume that the 0.7% difference represents customers who chose to go to the store in person to make the purchase after researching online.
Improving ROPO
It’s mainly in the relationship with consumers who come through the ROPO effect that the digital transformation we’re going through becomes even more evident in retail.
That’s because customers who research online first usually arrive at the store with a clearer idea of what they’re looking for: they know the typical prices for the product or service they want, as well as the main differences between what they’ll find in your store and what the competition offers.
On top of that, they also know what other consumers have to say about the products or services your store offers, as well as about the quality of its customer service.
So, in addition to investing in technology that turns the POS into an interactive experience — closer to what online shoppers are used to — it’s very important to take steps such as:
- training your staff to deal with this audience;
- making the store more welcoming and the product displays more visually appealing;
- keeping in mind what consumers can find online;
- highlighting key products to catch shoppers’ attention and invite them to interact;
- turning the purchase into a social experience through social media.
Finally, keep in mind that the reverse process also happens! In other words, consumers may see the product in person but only make the purchase online.
The in-store shopping experience and online sales
In the reverse of ROPO, consumers visit the physical store — where they have their first contact with the product — but only make the purchase in the online store. This can happen for a number of reasons: maybe they wanted to take their time deciding, or perhaps the online store had more attractive deals.
Either way, before buying, the customer had the chance to interact with your store, and that was certainly a factor in their decision to buy online. That’s why the in-store shopping experience plays a key role.
In short, just as online strategies play a very important role in drawing customers to the POS and increasing sales in physical stores, POS strategies can also attract new consumers to your online store. That’s exactly why it’s essential to invest in improving the shopping experience in both environments.
Want to learn more about the role of the shopping experience in your business’s success? Then stay with us to find out how to make it even better and, in doing so, make your company stand out in the market.
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