For independent bricks and mortar retailers, the idea of starting an online business can seem intimidating. However, considering that 87% of UK consumers have purchased a product online within the last 12 months, failing to expand  into e-commerce could be costing you valuable opportunities to increase brand awareness, expand your pool of customers and ultimately increase sales – the world of online cannot be ignored. With this in mind, here are five reasons why independent shops should be online.

1. Generate Customer Loyalty

If your business has a physical store, it can sometimes be difficult to increase customer loyalty. Considering that a 5% increase in customer retention can enhance  a company’s profitability by 75%, investing time in developing a  customer loyalty programme should be an integral component of any marketing strategy; otherwise you risk losing more customers than you gain, which isn’t a successful business model.

Offering your products online means you can set up reward schemes for loyal customers. These could include points-based rewards, offering delivery discounts, or birthday perks. A successful reward scheme should also track each customer’s interactions, such as what they purchase, when and why. This way you can target your rewards even more accurately.

Aside from encouraging them to spend more, loyalty schemes also make customers feel valued and more connected to a brand. According to a study by Kiteweel, 73% of customers feel loyalty programmes should be a way for brands to reward  a customer’s loyalty. On the other side of the coin, 66% of marketers feel that loyalty programmes are an effective way for  customers to show loyalty to their brand, meaning the programme will benefit both the customer and the business.

ASOS have created a reward system entitled ‘ASOS A-List’, where customers earn points every time they make a purchase, which can be converted into £5 vouchers once 500 points has been reached. The scheme is segmented into three different levels, which customers pass through as they spend more and earn more points. For example those on Level Two receive 15% off on birthdays, advanced warning of sales and four double points days, whilst Level Three shoppers receive 20% off on birthdays, 24-hour early access to sales and four triple points days. The more an individual customer shops with them online, the more rewards they obtain allowing ASOS to encourage loyalty and increase their profits.

2. Consumers are Choosing E-commerce

To stand a chance of staying competitive, you need to be where consumers are more likely to browse and purchase, and consumers are starting to use e-commerce shopping more regularly – in fact, the  average e-commerce spend per customer is estimated to be £1,600 over the course of the year. If you aren’t available online, potential customers will simply forget you and shop with one of your competitors who are.

However, the increase in e-commerce shopping doesn’t mean you should close down your store, but rather use online marketing to promote your e-commerce store and your physical store. Social media, namely Facebook, is undoubtedly one of the most useful marketing tools for online and offline shopping, with 15 million businesses now having a branded Facebook page worldwide.

For businesses with a physical location, reaching active and potential customers near their location to encourage in-store purchases is essential. Facebook Local Awareness allows you to create geo-targeted advertisements for your products or services and to reach users who are near your store. The advertisements can be personalised with a map card which promotes location-relevant information about your business, such as hours of operation, exact location, travel distance and direction links. Calls to action can also be added, including ‘call now’, ‘get directions’, ‘learn more’ or ‘send message’ enabling you to drive offline sales from online advertisements.

In attempt to upsell their Mother’s Day gifts, Tesco used Facebook Local Awareness to promote their products locally, meaning anyone who was nearby would be targeted with the ad on their newsfeed.  The ‘get directions’ calltoaction meant that those who were interested could load a map and locate their nearest Tesco store.

Facebook can also be used to promote online products through paid advertising. New Look have utilised this option by advertising the products featured in their imagery with a price and a clickable link which directs the user to the landing page for that specific product. By selling your products online and promoting them where consumers are most active, you will guarantee a higher return on investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts.

3. Reduce your Overheads Whilst Expanding

For independent retailer’s expansion is often a long-term goal, however it can seem unlikely with all the overheads that are involved with purchasing or renting new premises, such as staff and inventory. The constantly increasing rental prices for commercial property is also making expansion difficult – last April, commercial property rates rose by an astonishing £152 million.

Setting up an e-commerce website is significantly more cost-effective compared to purchasing new premises. Basic initial expenses will typically include a web hosting theme, domain name, building your website and some investment in marketing (emails, social media, etc.). The transition to online selling can be relatively smooth if you continue to sell products that are in high demand and for which you have a good supply.

Although you could spend thousands of pounds on developing a website to try and compete with multi-store businesses, a good website to compete with more realistic competitors can be developed for little expense. However, if your funds are rather l limited you could look into avoiding  business credit cards and applying to Liberis for further support. Website building platforms such as WordPress – the most commonly used, will provide a high-quality theme for your website with almost no coding required.

4. Be More Convenient

Whilst some fast food chains, petrol stations and some grocery stores are able offer a 24-hour service, this is impossible for the majority of businesses without the internet. Think about it, how much more profit could you make in-store if it was actually possible to be open for three times as long? One of biggest advantages of having an e-commerce store is that existing and potential customers are able to read about your offering and place orders whenever they want. You can generate leads, enquiries and sales at any time through a website while your physical store is closed and follow up these prospects and customers the next day.

The internet also allows you to provide answers to questions and solve customer problems, without them having to come into your store. Remember –  customers are likely to have questions before a purchase, such as queries about a product, or solving an issue with an existing purchase – questions that cannot be answered when your store is closed. However, an online presence means you can give them access to the information they are looking for when they need it.

5. Unique Offering

If a business working with a mass-produced product or service and chooses to be part of a marketplace that faces competition from the likes of Amazon and eBay, thousands of brands similar to yours will also be featured online. This could result in your product or service being lost in a sea of competition making it difficult to stand out and showcase your unique selling point.

Expanding your independent shop online means you can 100% focus on showcasing your brand and its niche. For example, if you’re a jewellery retailer selling handmade, bespoke items you can take make this part of your online advertising strategy. 93% of shoppers prefer local businesses who offer online shopping, indicating that buyers want to find something unique that isn’t offered anywhere else and cannot be obtained through larger retailers, but they still want the convenience of online shopping.

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. It may be a cliché, but its wisdom cannot be understated, especially for business owners and logistics managers. Poor planning of logistics can lead to missed deadlines, unnecessary business expenditures, and unhappy customers. If your business depends on your fleet of vehicles, investing in smart telematics logistic softwares can help you overcome the risks of poor planning, and can wind up saving your business more in the long term, despite the initial cost.

Telematics is similar to the ‘black box’ concept that insurance companies use, but is much more complex. Here, we’ll highlight just some of the ways smart fleet management for logistics, like LDP Transport Consultancy Ltd, can reduce business expenditure, and increase your revenue.

Monitoring driver efficiency can help to reduce fuel spend

In some cases investing in fleet management for logistics can work to drive your return on investment by reducing fuel expenditure. For example, Movolytics’ patented software monitors driver behaviour by gathering real-time data straight from the vehicle’s engine. It then delivers this information in reports and dashboards, highlighting any inefficient behaviours like staying in the wrong gear, harsh braking and aggressive acceleration.

All of these behaviours result in excessive fuel usage, so encouraging drivers to adopt better driving behaviours can help to reduce wastage. Cutting bad driving behaviours can save up to 33% of weekly fuel bills, per vehicle.

Idle time can be reduced with live traffic updates

Sitting in standstill traffic not only wastes fuel, but also emits harmful CO2 emissions into the atmosphere if the engine is left running. It’s recommended that you turn your engine off if you’re going to be idling for more than a minute. With telematics, that needn’t be a problem. Telematics systems can also work to reduce idling by providing drivers with real-time traffic updates, while offering alternative routes to help avoid traffic jams and congestion.

Beating the traffic can also work to ensure that drivers complete their jobs or deliveries in as little time as possible, which can maximise how much business your company can handle in a single day.

Telematics systems can also offer you and your clients a real-time update on where drivers are located, helping to boost customer satisfaction and boosting your brand reputation. Happy customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, and are also more likely to recommend the brand to friends and family, creating new avenues of revenue for your business.

Fleet maintenance reduces any costly downtime

Fleet maintenance can make or break your business. Just one vehicle out of action could result in delays and cancellations of services across the company. There are of course financial implications to this. Not only will you need to pay out for the repair costs of broken down vehicles, but you will also be losing out on business while the vehicle is out of action.

With this in mind, it’s important to regularly check and maintain your vehicles, ensuring they’re working at their most efficient and cost effective levels, and preventing any costly repairs from being needed. Fleet telematics systems provide maintenance alerts, flagging up any issues or reminding drivers when services are due. This can help prevent a business facing any of the costs associated with broken down vehicles.

While fleet management and smart logistics systems may seem like a costly investment to make for your business, the return on investment can be huge through cutting fuel costs, improving customer service or helping to maintain vehicles.

Too often, innovation in the business world is viewed merely as a product-based arms race. Business owners think it’s just about staying ahead of the competition, and trying to create something bigger and better than the other guy. And while that may be true on the most basic level, there’s so much more to innovation than that. In fact, in many ways, innovation has a very direct impact on your company’s bottom line.

Customer Retention

As a business owner, you’ve likely heard time and time again that it costs more to land a new client than it does to keep a current one. And though you may not realize it, your company’s ability to innovate can have a direct impact on your customer retention rates. If your company’s products and processes stagnate, your current customers are more likely to search elsewhere for more innovative products.

Similarly, innovations in your customers’ experiences with your business can help to drive up customer retention. This may include a more user-friendly interface to your software, faster customer service processes, and other innovations that make it more enjoyable for customers to continue working with your business.

You can take this one step further by actively including your customers in your innovation management programs. Seek their input, and actually put their ideas to use. If your customers feel that their ideas and feedback are valued, then they’ll become more loyal to your business. And according to research, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while your odds of selling to a new customer are only 5-20%. You can see how this might impact your bottom line in the long run.

Product Creation and Improvement

When thinking about innovation, creating new products is likely the first thing that comes to mind. And while there are many other types of innovation (as we’ve already mentioned), this is still an important one. Customers’ needs and demands are constantly shifting, and an effective innovation management program can help you stay on top of those changes and keep you ahead of the industry curve.

Of course, this can be difficult to do if you have only a small group of individuals providing ideas. As stated on Qmarkets.net, modern innovation management instead focuses on “leverage[ing] the power of collective intelligence and gain[ing] insights directly from your potential market” as well as “utiliz[ing] the knowledge and experience of your employees by involving them directly in your decision-making processes.”

By gathering input directly from consumers and employees, you’ll be better suited to predict trends and directly address consumer needs. Allowing these things to guide your product creation and improvements is more likely to drive up your sales and have a positive impact on your bottom line.

Process Improvement

In addition to improving products, an effective innovation management program can help you find ways to improve business processes and increase efficiency. According to The Shelby Report, “Whether it’s through duplication of efforts, tedious manual professes or employee productivity, inefficiency can cost your business anywhere from 20-30 percent annually.” That’s a huge chunk of your profits that are being flushed down the drain.

But how can you prevent this loss? To put it simply, ask the people who are enduring those tedious processes every day—your employees. As already mentioned, utilizing your employees’ knowledge and experience is a vital part of innovation management. They can see the redundancies more easily, because they’re on the front lines of these processes every day.

With an effective innovation management program, you can gather employee input and find ways to improve efficiency and increase your profits substantially.

Employee Engagement

In addition to helping you retain customers, effective innovation management can help you retain quality employees as well. How? By allowing employees to actively improve the business (and their own jobs), you’ll drive up employee engagement, and engaged employees are more likely to be loyal to your business, and are also more productive. Both of these contribute directly to improving your business’s bottom line.

So if you’re looking to drive up your profits, take a look at your current innovation program and ask if it needs improvement. Putting a little time into this aspect of your business can have significant, long-term benefits for your company.

One of the first questions that you may ask when you decide to set up a new business is how much that new company will cost to form. Registering a new company will be the first step that you take once you have determined the type of business that you want to open. This is the first legal step in any new company formation. No matter what type of business you start or what legal entity that new company takes on, you will need to register in some form in order to legally trade under that new business name. Fortunately, registering a company is quick, easy and relatively inexpensive in the UK.

If you are setting up your business as a sole trader or a general partnership, your costs are very minimal. In fact, the only legal requirement that you have for these two types of business formation is to register as self-employed with HMRC. This is a quick and free process that can be done online or via phone.

If you are forming a limited company, then you will also need to register your new company with Companies House. This is also a quick and simple process, although there are minimal fees for registration and the cost of those fees will depend on how you register your business.

Registering with Companies House costs around £12 if you submit the registration application online. You also have the option of registering via post, although this is a bit more expensive and it takes much longer to get your certificate of incorporation since you have to wait for the paperwork to be delivered to Companies House and then you have to wait for the approval to be mailed back to you. If you are not yet ready to begin trading, this is a good option. However, if you are ready to start trading instantly, registering online is a much better option since you can have your certificate of registration normally within 24 hours after submitting it online.

If you choose to work with a company formation agent, you may incur additional fees, although many believe these fees to be very fair. When you are registering your company, you are required to submit a memorandum and an articles of association, as well as information about your shareholders and directors. This information can be filled out by you or your company formation agent can help you with it. Many company formation agents will draft the memorandum and articles of association for you, which some business owners believe to be a much less stressful way of getting these documents completed. Company formation agents charge relatively low fees, depending on which agent you use, to draft paperwork and submit all of your required documents to Companies House for you.

However, you choose to register your new company, you will find that the fees are relatively low and the paperwork is minimal in most cases. Registration however, is required if you plan to form a limited company.