Where to Buy Local allows brands to connect online shoppers with offline brick and mortar stores. Like ChannelSight’s other features, it can appear on any relevant page across your brand’s website and it is a great tool for nurturing conversions.
When a visitor’s geolocation is accessible to their internet browser, the website automatically loads local stores. Otherwise, their browser will request access to this information. Shoppers who don’t want to make their location available, or who want to check availability in a different town, can also type a location into the map’s search bar.
Once the results appear, visitors can click on one of the stores pinned to the map or browse a list below it. Each listing provides directions, a website and a phone number. Brands can also opt to include the stock availability of each local retailer.
Whether shoppers want to pick up an order or to head straight to their nearest store, Where to Buy Local facilitates their journey.
Here’s why Where to Buy Local is so important for brands:
Buy online, pickup in-store fulfilment has come a long way from the early days of making an order online and collecting it at the store several hours later behind the customer service desk. It has had to adapt and reinvent itself, becoming a reliable channel for consumers to use.
BOPIS accounted for approximately 10% of all eCommerce sales in 2023 (Statista).
For brands, it can increase conversions by capturing shoppers who want to avoid shipping fees or lengthy delivery times - something which prevents 40-50% of shoppers from making online purchases.
Brands can easily facilitate click and collect sales by adding a Where to Buy Local store locator to their product pages. This will showcase stock availability at nearby stores and allow shoppers to conveniently click through to their favourite site to place an order.
This is a must-have website feature for brands selling bulky items that can cost a lot to deliver. It can also benefit brands that want to build stronger relationships with their retail partners.
This is because ChannelSight empowers brands to show retailers exactly how much click and collect footfall they drive through their website. Even if a shopper ends up ordering an alternative product, you can still show retailers how valuable your traffic is to their store.
Testimonial: “Since implementing ChannelSight solutions we have sent over 35,000 leads, with a value of £400,000, to partner retailer websites - which are directly attributable to our new Where to Buy call-to-actions.” - Joanna Weston, Digital Marketing Manager, Evergreen Garden Care
There are many situations where consumers may prefer in-store shopping over online purchases. Whatever the reason, brands can facilitate these shoppers by using Where to Buy Local to direct them to nearby retailers.
For brands that have invested in store merchandising or exclusive retail promotions, encouraging store visits is a sensible move. Beyond providing a positive customer experience, this has the potential to increase sales.
In fact, studies suggest that omnichannel customers tend to spend more both in-store and online, so encouraging visits to physical retail stores has the potential to positively impact your bottom line.
Using Where to Buy Local to facilitate click and collect purchases and showcase local stockists can be particularly effective at driving up sales for brands.
Testimonial: “The Where to Buy solution has enabled us to further strengthen our relationships with retailers by providing performance insights” - Sabine Boenisch, Solution Design Manager at BSH.
Click and collect is an important option for SMB retailers - especially if they don’t offer free and speedy delivery. It provides a way for them to compete with the likes of Amazon and also increases crucial in-store footfall.
For old-school retailers that haven’t got an online presence, a place on their supplier’s store locator is particularly valuable.
As with all ChannelSight’s tools, the layout of the Where to Buy Local widget can be customised to suit the needs of each brand and its retail partners. Where necessary, contact numbers and addresses can be added alongside a call to action.
For brands that want to show their support for local, independent businesses, a store locator offers a low-cost, but highly effective, way to do this.
For brands that have positive online reviews, Shoppable Ratings go hand-in-hand with ChannelSight’s Where to Buy widget.
Star ratings can appear on your website’s widget or on any other digital asset that you’ve added a ‘Buy Now’ button to. Anyone who clicks on a star rating is brought straight to the relevant retailer.
While the overall customer journey is similar to clicking a ‘Buy Now’ button, Shoppable Ratings can engage shoppers that aren’t ready to convert. This can increase click throughs and should drive up conversions.
Because star ratings come from third-party retailer sites, shoppers trust they are genuine. This can reassure shoppers and make them feel confident about making a purchase.
With ChannelSight’s Shoppable Ratings, brands can showcase a single five-star Amazon rating or share the ratings of every stockist in their retailer network. They can also place retailers with the highest ratings at the top of their Where to Buy lists.
Here’s just a few benefits of using Shoppable Ratings as part of your eCommerce strategy:
Showcasing customer feedback is so important as shoppers trust user-generated reviews more than marketing messages. When consumers can see that others liked a product, they feel more comfortable buying it too.
Actionable Insights: 44% of consumers check reviews every single time they shop online. 2% of shoppers never read reviews.
By providing a star rating up front, you can shorten the customer journey and show shoppers that your brand is trustworthy, ensuring a smooth path to purchase.
Including star ratings on your product ads also brings a sense of credibility to your marketing - which is particularly important when targeting new prospects. Simply put, showcasing your ratings can build trust, make shoppers confident enough to convert, and boost your overall reputation.
With ChannelSight’s Shoppable Ratings, brands gain visibility of the ratings and reviews of all their SKUs across their entire retailer network.
Information from every retail site and marketplace is brought together in a simple dashboard view. This enables brands to easily monitor their online reputation and quickly take action to address negative feedback.
This aspect of ChannelSight’s Shoppable Ratings empowers brands to gain oversight, protect their reputation and take more control of online consumer sentiment.
It is evident that product ratings have an effect on consumer behaviour, so understanding which products in your catalogue are poorly rated and highly rated can help you build better marketing strategies.
The data that Shoppable Ratings provide highlights how this feedback is impacting consumer behaviour. Brands can see how many stars and how many reviews are required to really wow shoppers and boost sales.
With these insights at their fingertips, anyone can build a high-impact data-driven digital strategy. This allows brands to focus on promoting products that perform well while reducing investment in those with bad ratings.
They can also rearrange their Where to Buy widgets so that, on each product page, the retailers with the highest ratings appear first. Optimising their strategy to generate more conversions and improve ROI.
Testimonial: “Prior to ChannelSight, we received sales data from our retailers. The data provided did not differentiate between online and offline, so it was hard for us to know what marketing was having the most influence on sales… [With ChannelSight] we can get to the heart of it all and see which online channels and call to actions are delivering.” - Joanna Weston, Digital Marketing Manager, Evergreen Garden Care
Basket composition data - aka product level purchase data - allows brands to see exactly what consumers buy from their retail partners.
This provides useful insights into the performance of your products by highlighting all brand and non-brand products that shoppers add to their final order. This enables brands to spot which competitor SKUs are stealing conversions away and what complementary products consumers are buying alongside your own.
These insights can inspire digital strategy in many ways. They can inform the creation of cross-selling campaigns, product bundles, special offers, on-site product recommendations, and a whole bunch of other AOV marketing strategies.
In terms of advertising, this information can also help brands reach highly relevant audiences by targeting the listings and keywords of these competitors and complementary products.
ChannelSight can also help you identify when a competitor is running ads on your marketplace product pages.
Testimonial: “Every year, ChannelSight tracks over 32 million retailer sessions and the contents of more than 1.5 million shopping carts. The insights this data gives our clients is invaluable” - Andrew Foot, Head of Marketing at ChannelSight
As the digital consumer journey evolves, it can be difficult to keep track of every online interaction. Using the Where to Buy solution as part of your advertising and social campaigns will allow you to figure out the true ROI of your marketing.
By tracking each visitor journey from click to check out, ChannelSight empowers brands to attribute each marketplace conversion to the ad or post that originally hooked a shopper. With this data, you can learn from every sale and streamline every path to purchase.
ChannelSight’s campaigns report shows how each marketing channel and campaign is performing. You can view leads, basket quantities, conversion rates and the revenue generated on each social media channel, search engine and website - all in one user friendly dashboard.
This allows brands to optimise their marketing spend and understand what kind of content works well.
Testimonial: “ChannelSight gives us in-depth insights on whether the consumers that we are reaching through our marketing efforts are converting. The solution also helped us identify the tools that were most effective when redirecting our users to retailers… ChannelSight has helped us create a blueprint for how we will roll out our digital strategy with other brands.” -Simon Swan, Head of Digital and eCommerce, Perrigo
With consumers demanding greater online privacy, a big benefit of ChannelSight’s Where to Buy solution is that it doesn’t rely on cookies.
Instead, ChannelSight uses link-tracking technology to monitor shoppers as they browse third-party retail sites. After a shopper leaves your website, they are tracked at a link level. Meaning visits to different product pages and check out are logged.
This is a non-intrusive way to gather high-level data on consumer behaviour. Also, ChannelSight doesn’t hold or have access to any first-party information so there is no way of knowing the actions of individual shoppers.
For brands serving the EU market, it’s worth noting that ChannelSight’s Where to Buy technology is 100% GDPR compliant too.
Learn more about our Where to Buy solution here.
