Research offline, purchase online and the reverse Research online, purchase offline.

ROPO strategy compliments the omnichannel vision by keeping the balance of consumer footprints to your brick & motor and ecommerce, beyond that a better sync between your digital and retail team, especially marketing team.

Why retailers should care about the ROPO effect:

Say your online marketing team wants to boost online sales. If they don’t consider the ROPO effect, they’ll probably discontinue advertising on all products that don’t result in a high volume of sales online.

When you consider the ROPO effect though, you might notice that certain products — like running shoe — might perform poorly online, but drive a high number of in-store visits.

Finally, it’s all about customer experience – make an impeccable one

Then: We got acquaint with ecommerce around 40 years ago while it’s early stage. All we knew was just online shopping.

Now: The global e-commerce sales have gone on from USD 572 billion in 2010 to USD 3.46 trillion in 2019. That is 313 % growth in revenue over the span of the decade.

These stats are clear proof of the insane growth that the market has seen over the last decade and this couldn’t be possible without the changes that force this evolution.

Highlight over key progression or changes in the Last Decade that got noticed in the last decade:

• Mutable Shopping Behavior
• Ease of Cross Border Trade
• Thriving M-commerce
• Digital Wallets and their convenience
• The dominance of Online Marketplaces

Yes, a mass of your user base might have reluctant mindset to create new accounts on your site by going through traditional registration system. Incomplete or incorrect data, bounce rate during registration is also a unique challenge.

Try Social Login (aka. social sign-on) using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google (and other) alternate option where your site users can use their existing account IDs from popular social networking platform to enrol the account on your site.

Better data means better marketing decisions. You’ll get your registered customer data and enhanced user experience of account registration section will be a side advantage.

Operating domestically and got the internationalization as business goals? No problem, you start taking baby steps and follow these three dimension in your going global strategy.

• Take the viable chunk of your catalog for overseas offering and focus on building localized version of your site – leverage multi-store & multi-currency ability of your platform and look to implement target region specific language translation on your site experience.
• Have a local flavour in your marketing activity, which can tap culture, and preferences of the region.
• Correctly address all applicable compliance related to taxation filings, duty/levies, trading firm registration and other similar stuff

Lack of personal contact and an in-person interaction with potential customer is the obvious limitation of traditional e-business. Having this constraint, businesses should adopt more efficient and effective means of virtual communication using multiple channels.

Customer query ranging from order status, product inquiry, refund/exchange, availability & discounts, payment stuff, shipment tracking and more like these would require appropriate messaging and clear communication to guard against any misunderstandings. This will also have positive impact on your shopping experience and conversion too.

On the top of traditional email alerts, one should engage other mediums of communication such as phone helpline, live chat, support tickets, text alert on mobile and even WhatsApp in some regions. Staying more forthcoming and putting most kind of information in self-service manner on your site would decrease your customer support staff bandwidth.