How to Confidently Transition Your Physical Store Online with Square and Lucky Orange

Taking the jump from brick-and-mortar to online can be overwhelming, but it's vital in today's online-first world.

With such a vast market new brands have the opportunity to carve out a piece of this huge revenue, but it's crucial that your online shopping experience is high quality for customers. 

Many times customers would rather scroll through their phones or on a website to find a product rather than commute to a store. This mindset is growing the interest in online shopping, making it a promising chance for brick-and-mortar stores to broaden their business.

Even if you have a strong, growing in-store business, layering in the online presence to your business gives you another channel to acquire new customers or for existing customers to access your products from the comfort of their own home.

Moving your business online can provide a number of benefits, such as increased efficiency, cost savings, improved customer service and access to new markets. You can ensure that you stay ahead of the competition and take advantage of all the opportunities that the digital world has to take your business to the next level.

Taking your Business Online

Creating your Website 

Building an online presence for your business may seem daunting and expensive, but there are now tools and software available that make the process quicker and similar than ever before.

While there are many great options for building your e-commerce website, Square stands out with simple features and unlimited customization.

You may know Square solely as the point-of-sale solution that allows anyone to become their own retailer in seconds using digital chip readers. But recently, the company has introduced Square Online, a website builder that works seamlessly with other Square products, such as the Square Space, Point of Sale and Appointments.

Square Online is an easy way for physical businesses to set up their online websites in minutes with zero design or coding experience.

The technology uses tools to help you sell unlimited products online and fulfill orders electronically. The platform offers a range of templates that can be customized to fit any business' needs.

Check out the Square Online App Marketplace

Square Online offers an app marketplace with over 70 free third-party plugins. add-ons, or apps for your website creation, including Lucky Orange. It's an excellent resource to manage shipping, inventory, invoicing, and other features to simplify the process. You can customize your website according to your needs with these plugins.  

For example, Jotform is an integration that allows users to create custom forms for their websites quickly and easily. This integration lets you collect data from customers or visitors without needing any coding knowledge.

Using these integrations through the Square extensions makes it easier than ever to create a professional-looking website with all the features you need to succeed.

Square makes it easy to be a well-rounded online business on par with more experienced companies.

How to Remain Confident With Your New Online Store

Lucky Orange’s Role

If you haven’t heard of Lucky Orange, Lucky Orange is an all-in-one conversion optimization suite that can help website owners identify drop-offs in the buying process.

Our software uses dynamic heatmaps, session recordings, form analytics and more to find out why a customer may or may not be purchasing your product. 

Key Lucky Orange Features

Lucky Orange's Dynamic Heatmaps provide valuable insights into user clicks, taps, and scrolls so you can see which areas of your page are most popular and which ones need improvement. 

Session Recordings you watch as visitors navigate live through your site, so you can catch any potential issues or areas of improvement. 

Form Analytics help you understand why visitors aren't converting by tracking form abandonment rates and providing detailed feedback from users on what could be causing it. All these features combined provide invaluable insights into how visitors interact with your site so you can make informed decisions to improve your conversion rate.

And Lucky Orange Surveys bring it all together to validate assumptions and hypotheses. Even a quick one or two-question visitor survey can give you the confidence you need to make big decisions with your website.

Why should we care about Square?

If you use Square, you can easily install Lucky Orange through the Square app marketplace and have our tools directly on your website with no extra set-up or technical know-how. Our tool on Square Online can help businesses gain confidence in their website and make data-driven decisions to improve conversion rates.

What to Consider when Building a new e-commerce Store

Branding 

Branding is an essential part of any business, but especially e-commerce or retail. Branding helps to create a lasting impression on customers and differentiate the company from its competitors.

Consistency in branding and customer experience between physical and online presences is crucial for businesses to build trust and loyalty with their customers. This can be a challenge for businesses, as they must ensure that their physical stores reflect the same values, mission, and personality as their online presence. 

Using website builders such as Square Online can help businesses bridge the gap between physical and online branding by providing a platform for an easily customizable website to match their physical store’s aesthetic while creating a cohesive brand experience that resonates with new and loyal users.

Building Customer Loyalty and Brand Awareness

Having a website that is well-designed and easy to use, with interesting content, can motivate people to make purchases online or in-store while fostering customer loyalty.

No one will take the time to navigate a poorly designed website, they’ll simply click away. Businesses want to create a seamless shopping experience that keeps customers coming back for more.

To successfully transition from physical loyalty to online loyalty, businesses need to maintain consistency in their branding, messaging, and overall customer experience across all channels. 

By using online strategies to influence customers to visit their physical stores or encourage online purchases, businesses can create a seamless omnichannel experience that fosters customer loyalty and drives growth.

The key lies in maintaining consistency across all touchpoints, leveraging data analytics to guide marketing strategies, and continuously adapting to keep up with changes in the digital world.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a critical metric that measures the percentage of visitors to your online store who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. 

Essentially, it serves as an indicator of how effective your website is at transforming visitors into paying customers. To calculate the conversion rate, simply divide the number of successful conversions by the total number of visitors, and then multiply the result by 100 to express it as a percentage.

SEO

SEO or search engine optimization helps drive traffic to e-commerce websites by improving their visibility to users in search engine results. You want your business to show up on the first page of search results so customers can find your products quickly and easily. This is done by finding relevant high-volume keywords and adding descriptive meta tags to their website's code to rank higher.

Content marketing also plays an important role in SEO.

Creating blog posts that appeal to the target audience and highlight the products or services can help improve search engine rankings. Additionally, optimizing images with alt tags and creating internal links between pages on the website can further improve visibility.

Following best practices for SEO, online retailers can ensure their website appears higher up in search engine rankings and attract more visitors.

Quality over Quantity

To be successful in ecommerce, you need to provide a high-quality shopping experience that matches the quality of your products.

Just like with successful brick-and-mortar stores, you should already understand the importance of providing a quality product and allowing customers to interact with it (such as touching fabrics, smelling a candle, or holding a watch).

Prioritizing quality over quantity content is key for success in ecommerce too. Quality content involves creating an online store with adaptive content and visuals, along with fast load times. High-quality content helps customers find what they need faster and more efficiently, increasing overall conversion rates. 

Visuals are just as important because they help create an attractive and inviting atmosphere that encourages customers to browse and make purchases. Product pages need to be visually appealing to gain customer trust as well. 

Finally, fast load times are essential for keeping customers engaged with the website and ensuring that they leave with a positive experience.

Overall, to increase the chances of purchase, businesses should prioritize providing customers with the best possible user-friendly experience by emphasizing quality rather than quantity on their online stores.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the potential of adding ecommerce to one's business cannot be overstated, especially in today's consumer-driven world where online shopping has become an integral part of our daily lives.

By embracing e-commerce, you can not only generate new revenue streams but also reach a global audience beyond geographical boundaries.

Countless businesses have successfully expanded and thrived by integrating an online shopping experience into their operations. Small brick-and-mortar stores have now become established online brands, while bigger retailers have stayed ahead of the competition by providing customers with the convenience of shopping from home.

The success stories are endless.

If you're looking to start selling online or considering switching from another website builder, Square is the perfect choice to embark on your ecommerce journey. 

Don't let the fear of the unknown hold you back. Take advantage of ecommerce to boost your business to new heights. Explore Square and join the ranks of countless businesses that have unlocked their full potential by embracing the digital world. 

The future of commerce is here, and it's waiting for you to take the leap.