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
-
Keyword Cannabalisation & Ecommerce
Hi I have an Ecommerce site, with a lot of similar products - for example leather office chairs - 80 products all very similar.. We worked to optimise product pages for longer tail phrases such as black executive leather office chair, but we now have different product pages trying to rank for these longer tail phrases as well. Now I'm trying to decide whether to focus on some priority product pages - adding lots of useful content/videos etc to try & boost the ones we want to rank for the long tail. OR whether to focus on the category page, and getting this to rank for all keyword variations... I'm a it stuck - any advice is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Will this affect
Hi there! I've got a question that I'm having trouble answering. My client has one site url essentially has two sites within it. The homepage (name-photography.com) content focuses on her fashion photography services with a specific design and look with almost no mention of weddings unless you click the weddings icon. When you click on weddings, it takes you to a "new" site on the same url (name-photography.com/weddings) that has entirely different look and feel. The client would like to improve her visibility for her wedding services and not the fashion photography side. Would it be more beneficial to house the wedding services on an entirely new URL so that homepage content can be wedding focused. Again, with the current homepage, it's all fashion photography focused and not easy to redo. Or could one implement a 301 redirect from the fashion homepage (name-photographer.com) to the wedding homepage (name-photographer.com/weddings)? Thanks for your advice! Jessica
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zigzen0 -
How much does "Sud-domain SEO optimisation" improves website ranking?
Let's say there is a website(domain) and couple of sub-domains (around 6). If we optimise all sub-domains with "keyword" we want our website to rank for.....like giving "keyword" across all page titles of sub-domains and possible places which looks natural as brand mentions. Will this scenario helps website to rank better for same "keyword"? How can these sub-domains do really influence website in rankings? Like if the sub-domains have broken links, will this affect website SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Handling of product variations and colours in ecommerce
Hi, our site prams.net has 72.000 crawled and only 2500 indexed urls according to deep crawl mainly due to colour variations (each colour has its own urls now). We now created 1 page per product, eg http://www.prams.net/easywalker-mini and noindexed all the other ones, which had a positive effect on our seo. http://www.prams.net/catalogsearch/result/?q=002.030.059.0 I might still hurt our crawl budget a lot that we have so many noindexed pages. The idea is now to redirect 301 all the colour pages to this main page and make them invisible. So google do not have to crawl them anymore, we included the variations in the product pages, so they should still be searchable for google and the user. Does this make sense or is there a better solution out there? Does anyone have an idea if this will likely have a big or a small impact? Thanks in advance. Dieter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Awesome Ecommerce category pages
Hi! We are in the process of overhauling our websites, and I am hoping that some of you can post URLs for websites that are ranking well and using lots of creative content to help rank their ecommerce category pages. You can post your own, or others that you admire.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC1 -
Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.
We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site. We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this? We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue; adding "no index" to all filtered pages making the filters uncrawble using javascript Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream0 -
The Affects of Removing Anchor Texts from Super Menu on Homepage
Hi, Currently we have a div that drops down our super menu which has subcategories, ie. under Shop by Color (super menu) Black Ties, Blue Ties, Brown Ties, et, al. (see Ties.com Anchor Text image attached) If we were to remove these subcategories from the div (in other words, they do not get crawled from homepage, will we loose ranking for those keywords? We are trying to reduce link count on homepage. Thoughts? UBHu8.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ties.com0