A collegiate retail eCommerce site that offers your college store’s wide array of merchandise and products is essential to success. While many students are excited about being able to shop in the college store again, the convenience of online shopping will encourage a portion of the student population to primarily use your website. We have gathered some tips to help you ensure your online merchandise is easy to find and convenient to order.
5 Ways to Sell and Promote Merchandise Online
- Improve your eCommerce search functionality with filters
Customers do not always come to a website with the intention of browsing through pages and pages of merchandise. Often, they come with a specific idea of what they want in mind. Setting up a wide variety of filtering options will give students an easy way to narrow the scope of what they see to ultimately find what they are looking for.
Check out this blog post to learn more about helping customers find merchandise on your collegiate retail website with search filters. - Offer customers automatic product suggestions
If a customer is shopping in the store for a game day shirt, a sales associate might also point out a sale on hats or gloves for a cold weekend football game. While you can’t offer that same level of personal detail online, you can make sure customers see a selection of recommendations based on the products they viewed. For example, if the customer is looking at a board game, your eCommerce site could recommend additional board games stocked in your store.
Check out this video to learn more about setting up suggested sell items on your eCommerce site. - Enable reviews and rankings
One tool many online shoppers depend on is reviews and product rankings. If you are looking at a product with 500 five-star reviews versus a product with four three-star reviews, which would you choose? By enabling reviews on your website, you can offer customers more confidence that the merchandise is high quality, fits as expected and will meet their expectations.
Read this blog post to learn more about enabling product reviews and rankings on your college store site. - Highlight clearance merchandise
We talked about how to best serve customers who come to your site knowing what they want. What about those who are just looking for a good deal? Think about how many people come into the store and head straight for the clearance or sale racks. Offering a dedicated clearance section on your website can have the same effect and encourage people to visit your site regularly.
Learn how to set up a clearance page on your college store website. - Use promotions to sell older merchandise
Another way to sell older merchandise is to set up fun, periodic sales. With these, you can move more inventory, keep your website content fresh and ramp up your social media presence. Consider trying several different promotional methods to see which works best with your students, faculty, staff, alumni and community.
Read this blog to learn more about utilizing promotions online.
Get all of these features and more with the complete MBS collegiate retail system. Speak to your MBS Store Technology Solutions representative for more details.
