UTeM A6 3B

You can also use your online store to push people to your offline store, of course. Many merchants do more business from the offline store after a buyer visited the online store than they do in the online store itself. In fact, the Internet generates more offline sales than online sales overall. Recent studies have shown the importance of the W2S shopper or the off-channel shoppers. A study commissioned by ShopLocal.com, for instance, found that in the fourth quarter of 2004, 83 million Americans had researched products online, then made purchases both online and offline (they referred to these buyers as W2S, or Web-to-Store, shoppers). On average they
■ Spent $250 online
■ Spent $400 in a brick-and-mortar store on products they researched online
■ Spent an additional $200 in the stores when buying the researched products As you can see, the average buyer was spending $250 online and $600 offline as a result of their online research. The study had this to say: “W2S shoppers rely on the Internet nearly twice as much for local purchasing information compared to traditional shopping media, such as newspaper advertisements and inserts; local TV and radio ads; and other media.” Another study, by Forrester Research, came to similar conclusions, about what they termed off-channel shoppers:
■ Most Internet users are off-channel shoppers.
■ They spend more money offline after researching online than they spend online.
■ Almost half of these buyers purchase additional products when they visit the store.
■ Forrester Research estimated that the Web was generating over $100 billion in offline sales.
If you own both an online and offline store, you can’t ignore these numbers. As one merchant told us recently, “We don’t know how much brick-and-mortar business our online store is generating, but we know it’s big; we keep seeing people walking into our stores with printouts from our web store.”How, then, do you use an online store to generate business offline?
■ Do all the things we mentioned under “Using Your Brick-and-mortar to Promote Your Online Site.” It’s a two-way street, and if your customers don’t know your store exists, they can’t use it to see what products you have.
■ Make sure you include a good store locator. Make it easy for site visitors to find your store address and maps and directions. By the way, this also helps you make online sales. As we mentioned elsewhere, simply placing a phone number on a site can increase sales, as it improves credibility. Making it quite clear that you are a well-established offline store boosts credibility, too.