The journey of a cross-channel customer does not stop at the Store Locator;
that’s where it begins

Before you read further, stop and think for one second: Do you know that your Online Store Locator attracts one-fourth of your total website traffic? And still that traffic gets lost after that. Read on……

The Rise of the Cross-Channel Consumer:

Retail models during the past 200 years have evolved in the following way: In the Middle Ages, bartering, swapping and ordering hand-crafted goods, made to individual customer’s requirements, were the order of the day — the last option affordable only by the very rich. Later, inventions, technological innovations such as mechanization and large-scale production methods were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Once this revolution was established, mass produced and cheaply manufactured goods began to prevail in the world's markets; with mass customization as the goal. Even today, retailers are living with that product-centric legacy. However, consumer expectations are shifting back to Pre-Industrial Revolution thinking, but with a twist.

This time, retail is being enabled by the Digital Revolution and its easy access to today's technological innovations. Consumers are continuously redefining how they want to shop. They want to cross channels with ease, shopping here, buying there, and returning somewhere else. And, they want to do it at their convenience, in their community, whether it is at a bricks-and-mortar store or online.

LocalStore360™ – A Multichannel Innovation

Savvy retailers use one channel’s resources to improve results from another. Up to now, online sales have grown independent of business streams such as catalog and store sales. The individual units of a company (with different reporting lines, marketing budgets and customer service centers) are still operating independently of each other and fighting for the same customer. Quite simply, retailers are cannibalizing sales - and they’re starting to realize that even more in a recession. The biggest question is, what’s the secret to attracting dollars from a cross-channel customer’s wallet? How do we entice the customer who researches online to walk into our store versus going to another retailer?

LocalStore360™ is the answer. It enables real-time collaboration between shoppers, stores, social media, smart phone apps, emails and websites giving the retailer a single view of the customer. It is based on the cutting-edge insights from actual customer transaction data and behavioral analysis of various consumer touch points. Using the powerful platform offered by LocalStore360, a big box retailer can create triggers to action for customers as they surf and shop from web channel to store channel and vice versa.

At the moment there are minimal incentives for customers that research a product online to go to the same retailer’s store. LocalStore360 captures the attention of such cross-channel customers as they research online and then look for any offline information such as Store Locators, Store Circulars etc. It provides a 360 degree view of the local store including its real-time inventory, products, services, promotions, in-store contests, printable coupons and lots more. Your customers can create mobile shopping lists online and when inside the store, they can quickly find the exact locations of the products in their shopping lists using their smart phones.