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In today’s internet-powered retail climate, shoppers regularly equip themselves with online information before making a decision — including which stores to visit when making a purchase decision. This activity, known as pre-shopping, has only increased as shoppers look to make the most of their time and visit only stores where they know they have an interest.
As a furniture retailer, it is as important for you to create a compelling local retail experience online as it is to create a positive in-store shopping experience. Your online store should be your flagship store - both a productive store in itself and the gateway to your brick-and-mortar locations.
In this dual role, your online store also needs to be completely synchronized with a shopper’s local store, enabling the movement between online and in-store that characterizes today’s shopping journeys.
To optimize your furniture ecommerce store for local shoppers, you need software specifically designed for local ecommerce optimization. Advanced technology can automatically locate online shoppers and present them with localized marketing, merchandising, pricing, and inventory information that will match their local store.
Keys to Creating a Localized Experience
Localization is part of a personalized shopping experience, expected by over half of all consumers. Effectively attracting potential shoppers in your area and engaging them both on your website and at your local store requires a furniture ecommerce platform built for this dual role.
Leverage Local SEO
Furniture ecommerce search engine optimization (SEO) allows you to reach more customers. While general SEO can increase organic traffic on your website and can help grow your online sales, local SEO website tactics can increase in-store sales.
Local furniture store SEO enhances the online visibility of your brick-and-mortar business in local search engine results.
Customers often search furniture keywords for pre-shopping activities. They aren’t only looking for store location information but are also educating themselves about everything from local product favorites and product availability to local coupon codes and finance offers before they head to the store.
Understanding how local SEO for furniture stores works is essential, as is implementing various local SEO tips. These techniques require you to create website content pertinent to individual locations. For example, you could create local content for each store based on relevant product information, availability, and pricing at that individual store.
To efficiently optimize your furniture ecommerce website for local search, you should use an ecommerce solution designed specifically to support both in-store and online sales.
Localize Your Content
Local store optimization is easy with the right tools. Blueport uses your content to automatically show customers localized information that matches what they would see in their neighborhood store. This localization provides a consistent shopping experience for shoppers and ensures they are getting accurate information.
So, how exactly does the Blueport furniture ecommerce software know where your website visitors are searching from?
Geolocation
The process of identifying and tracking where connected devices are located is known as geolocation. Technologies like using technologies like GPS or IP addresses identify where your potential customer is while browsing your website.
Geolocation allows you to offer shoppers a local experience on your website with localized marketing and merchandising, localized inventory, and localized delivery and pickup options.
Localized marketing and merchandising
Geo-aware content management tools let you present marketing content based on the searcher's location, including:
- Featured products based on local popularity
- Site graphics for regional events
- Retail pricing
- Sale pricing
- Finance offers
- Coupon codes
Ensuring this information is consistent with local stores provides a consistent experience when shoppers move between your online and brick-and-mortar stores — or even access your website while in your stores. This both inspires confidence in a purchase and allows seamless completion of orders researched online and completed in-store (and vice-versa).
Localize your Inventory
Inventory management and delivery is a critical component of furniture store operations, and it is even more complex for organizations with multiple locations.
Localized Inventory
Geolocation can automatically locate shoppers and only show them the available inventory in their area. It can also be used to display the most popular products in a given region, which may differ significantly from store to store. Here again, displaying accurate inventory information improves a unified shopping and buying experience.
Localized Delivery & Pickup Options
Furniture shoppers have to think about how to get their purchases home, and this is a topic of much online research.
For delivery options, geolocation allows your customers to find out exactly how and when they can receive their products by giving them real-time delivery availability and delivery costs based on their zip code. For those who prefer to pick up their items themselves, available pickup dates for the store closest to them can be displayed.
The Blueport Platform — Built to Support Local Furniture Stores
Developed as an omnichannel-first technology, the Blueport platform was designed specifically to empower furniture retailers to meet their customers at many different touchpoints. For customers to move seamlessly between online shopping and their local physical stores, the software was developed with geolocation capabilities to optimize furniture ecommerce websites for local shoppers.
Ultimately, shoppers will engage with online content that is relevant to them, and providing them with local content is an important part of a seamless omnichannel experience. Having the ability to optimize your furniture store for local shoppers is just one of many features you need in your ecommerce platform.
We’ve compiled a comprehensive punch list of furniture website capabilities you must have to maximize sales online and in your stores. Get yours today!
