The customer has always been the king and will always be. Especially in the retail industry, which offers hundreds of options for every product, it becomes challenging to acquire and retain customers.
So, here we have listed a few usual retail industry challenges, and how a retail business owner can turn them into opportunities.
Let’s take one retail industry challenge at a time. In short, focus on creating an outstanding retail experience for your customers by adopting these strategies.
With digital intervention, customers today have the option of buying from both offline and online stores. Before buying from the physical store, the consumer will compare the product’s price with its online store. Even in the online space, often the product offers, and discounts differ on the product’s website and other e-commerce platforms.
What’s the Solution?
This challenge in the retail industry can be turned into an opportunity by striking a balance and building a transparent cross-channel experience for your consumers. Retail businesses can use their customer data to analyze how, where, and when their customers interact and engage themselves. Additionally, this will allow you to track their real-time feedback and curate offers, and utilize different channels based on the data.
Suggested Read: Top Retail POS Billing Software Solutions for Business
The distribution of goods in India is chaotic with infrastructural limitations. The traditional supply chain combined with poor infrastructure ultimately leads to high marked-up retail prices of goods. This one of the major retail industry challenge happens due to unorganized and unsystematic long supply chains with multiple intermediates like wholesalers and distributors.
What’s the Solution?
This is one of the major retail industry trends and challenges that can be addressed with technology and smartness. Implementation of a warehouse management system in your online retail business in India can help you attain order accuracy, control inventory, and third-party distributions. Moreover, the modern trade business model can help you eliminate intermediates and offer a competitive price to survive in the market.
Suggested Read: List of Logistics and Supply Chain Management Software in India
Managing a retail business in India involves a bunch of manual routine tasks that take up time and effort. In the initial stages of your business, it might seem easy to let employees perform these tasks. But as your business grows, these manual tasks will lead to more errors and demand more manpower. Although, with automation, you can save time, human resources, eliminate errors, and attain accuracy.
What’s the Solution?
So, to automate and streamline the daily processes of an online retail business, invest in the right tools. Implementing the right software will help you to save time and effort while becoming efficient.
Top billing solutions like eR4u can be integrated into your eCommerce website, and you can easily manage and grow your offline and online retail business. eR4u offers multiple features with competitive pricing that can be customized to cater to your retail business requirements.
After attracting and acquiring new customers, the next biggest challenge is to retain them. Customers are 24*7 lured into new products, discounts, and attractive offers. So, how can you ensure that they only come to you and become loyal to your brand?
What’s the Solution?
The one and only mantra to deal with this challenge in the retail business model is to deliver a well-synced and a WOW shopping experience for your customer. For instance, if your customer has shown interest or purchased a product on your online store, your offline store should have knowledge of the same. This will make your customers feel valued and give them a feeling that you already know them.
Starbucks is one such brand that has successfully managed to create a loyal customer base for itself for years now. The brand offers a loyalty program called, ‘My Starbucks Rewards’ wherein the customers receive reward points and discounts when they pay from the Starbucks app’s built-in payments option. This interests the customer, and they always go back wanting more.
Suggested Read: Most Effective Employee Retention Strategies for Today’s Work Culture
The retail business in India is expected to cross $350 billion by 2030. But it still lacks the required trained professionals to fulfil workforce needs. Additionally, training employees come with uncertainty related to employee retention in retail business services.
What’s the Solution?
To avoid a high employee turnover rate in your retail business, increase your employee engagement with frequent training programs. Focus on upskilling your employees, and they will stick around. In addition to this, constantly keep motivating your employees with regular benefits and employee-centric HR policies.
Technologies like eR4u can help in strategizing and executing training programs to upskill your employees as per the changing industry trends.
Your brand image speaks volumes about your product. Moreover, with freedom and anonymity on social media, anyone can make a negative comment or statement about your brand, and you can’t even control that.
What’s the Solution?
Digital image is the first impression of your retail brand, and you don’t want it to go wrong. The right digital marketing strategy can get you leads, drive leads, increase customer engagement, and even get them to show up in your stores.
But how do you know what’s working for you? First, don’t hesitate to experiment with different trends, formats, or SEO. Connect all your marketing campaigns like email, SMS, and social media to CRM. This will help analyze and understand how every campaign is working for you, and what it is contributing to your leads, sales, and engagement.
Branding can seem much easier with the right software by your side. eR4u is a great tool to devise your branding strategies and ensure successful execution.
Suggested Read: Best Retail POS System for Small Business in India and Across the Globe
To Summarize,
The retail business in India has immense potential and will grow in the coming years with digitization. No doubt, the retail industry faces challenges, but they can be turned into opportunities with the right strategies and technologies.
FAQs
Reducing human errors in routine tasks, maintaining customer loyalty in the competitive market, finding and hiring skilled professionals, and retaining them are some of the challenges in retail business.
Factors that have an impact on the retail industry are market competition, economic status of the country, new trends, technological advancements, and political stability.
Growth opportunities in the retail industry revolve around market penetration and expansion, diversification, and format development.
The opportunities of retail business lie in market penetration and expansion along with diversification. Technology adoption in the retail sector is helping retailers automate, analyze and grow.
The grocery store is the most profitable business retail business in India. It requires minimal investment and no specific skills and can be started in any commercial or residential area.
Yes, a wholesaler can sell goods to both consumers and other retailers. Walmart and Zellers are popular examples of the same model.
The global market of retail business is growing at a high pace. In fact, in 2020, the global retail business was valued at nearly $20,331.1 billion.
You can reduce costs in retail business by automating manual tasks, reducing operating costs, minimizing packaging costs, initially starting with outsourcing, etc.
To scale your retail business, maintain consistency, sell both online and offline, offer a personalized customer experience, and use data to re-target your customers.
To make money in retail business, you should make the necessary goods available to customers at their best convenience. Make sure to correctly market your products to the right audiences.
To start a home based online retail business, start with market research and then develop or buy products. Next, market your products to make them reach the right audiences and start selling on your online or offline store.
Retail business management is a process of managing the routine activities of offline and online retail stores.
To increase sales in the retail business, you can create loyalty programs for customers, manage inventory to avoid wastage, hire skilled professionals, display your store in top Google searches, and more.
To start a retail business in India, you need to get business registration, GST registration, shop, and establishment license.
Related Categories: ERP Software | Manufacturing Software | Retail ERP Software | Agriculture ERP | Point of Sale Software | POS Machine
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