Why 70% of Grainger Customers are using their Online Store?
Believe it or not, in the Supplies Industry, being old-school and innovative don't have to be mutually exclusive. Just look at Grainger, the Fortune 500 industrial supplies company. It is'and has been for a long time-a partially brick-and-mortar, catalog-driven retail business. Old-school at its core. But it also has a consistent track record of innovation and has adapted early and often to changing technology and consumer preferences. People in the Supplies Industry who are pushing back against e-commerce and digitization could learn a thing or two from this old-school-yet-innovative company, which saw $11.2 billion in sales last year.
Keep up on current tech and use digital tools to your advantage.
Grainger had a smooth transition from Brick & Mortar sales to e-commerce. Why? Because they didn't abruptly switch over. Instead, they eased into digital and also quickly created a great online experience to convince first-time online shoppers that online is better. Now they have 70% of their customers online.
Of course, they still have brick-and-mortar stores. But because they knew consumer preferences were changing, they jumped out ahead of the trend and made online shopping available for their customers.
Some customers want to browse online. Others want to walk the aisles of a physical store. Both customers should be able to do what they want, plain and simple. Grainger knows that-and you should, too, though it is as easy said than done. Dilemma is that you are a small business, you cannot sell online below your store price, you have a dedicated customer base, you cannot afford to annoy them by selling cheaper online than in your stores. Online is fierce competition, if you reduce prices blindly, then you sell at loss and also annoy your regular in-store customers. Online pricing depends on various parameters, your competitors pricing to be the core, their inventory, their inventory turnover ratio, frequency of price changes, how much inventory you have overlapping with your competitors, there is a lot to be considered before making a pricing decision and most importantly a bulk decision on pricing does not work, competition is now at SKU level, so you need a modern AI based pricing tool that analyses inventory that deep and auto adjusts prices, which makes more profits, which can think like a human.
