Online meets real-world shopping

I’ve been hearing about an interesting trend coming out of the United Kingdom and the US – retailers with online shopping carts have been mounting iPads in their physical stores.

What this has enabled consumers to do is browse catalogues and products online as well as within the store, all on an exciting new product which they really love using.

For stores, it means that consumers can get a lot of additional information about products than they normally get when they’re looking at the actual product in store. You know yourself that when you’re browsing products in store, there’s often very little information about a product, other than a price tag, maybe an energy rating sticker or a product label with limited info.

When you’re in a shop, product information is usually provided by helpful sales staff (if they’re not too busy to help you!).

When it comes to online shopping though, many eCommerce retailers use quite helpful descriptions about their products which helps consumers learn more about the features and benefits of the products they’re interested in.

Mounting iPad’s in store allows consumers to browse at their leisure in a “self-service” kind of way.

The other benefit is that people are reportedly staying in store longer, which enables sales staff more time to close sales.

iPads also help sales staff when a product is out of stock at the store location. Consumers can see the entire product range and if something they’re really interested in is not in store, sales staff can order it in from other stores or through head office.

All in all a really interesting trend and one that you could easily explore adopting for your own store.

The final benefit is you may be able to finally justify buying one for your business as a legitimate business expense. You may just find yourself taking it home at night “for safe keeping”.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.