Throughout this turbulent year for retail, the team at NearSt have been looking at ways we can best help shops continue to trade and adapt to ever changing rules of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Once click-and-collect services were allowed during the second lockdown, coupled with a 7x increase in people checking in-store availability online, we rapidly built a new feature that allows shoppers to reserve items online to collect in-store.
Here I’ll share how this new feature works, the results we’ve seen so far and how to get the most out of it.
How does it work?
Once a shopper finds what they need through your Google See What’s In Store or Local Inventory Ads, they can click through to your NearSt shop page where they’ll find a ‘Reserve a Product’ button:
Shoppers can click this button to request to reserve one (or more!) of your items. You’ll receive an email with their request, along with the customer’s contact details to arrange collection directly.
What results have you seen?
After only a couple of weeks, the reservation requests have been rolling in — and we’ve had some fantastic feedback from our shops!
“We are getting daily reservations now that are making a sale and bringing in customers that we may potentially lose through lack of a retail website- so this is very positive news indeed. I would like to thank NearSt for developing this feature, times are very tough at the moment and this is helping our online presence no end.” David Mann, Planters Garden Centre
As more shops start to promote this new feature on social media, reservation requests continue to rise.
We’ve seen that shops who have been sharing this feature with their customers are getting more daily orders on average.
How can I share this feature?
We’ve listed a few tips below on how you can best share this feature to encourage more reservation requests:
- Post on social media to let your customers know they can now reserve items online
2. Use our new sharing tools available in MyShop to direct customers to your See What’s In Store from your website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
3. Activate Local Inventory Ads to get your products in front of shoppers searching for them nearby — each ad links to your NearSt shop page where shoppers can reserve the item
4. Direct customer email and phone queries to your See What’s In Store so they can check your stock and product details and then request to reserve items, without taking up precious admin time!
How do I enable it?
It’s quick and easy (and free!) to enable this feature, all you have to do is add the email address you would like reservation requests to be sent to in your MyShop account in the ‘Shop page’ section.
If you aren’t currently using NearSt, we’d love to have you join us! Just sign up here and our team will be in touch.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and we’re here to help if you have any questions! Just get in touch by calling us on 020 3322 2435 or email us at support@near.st.
