Existing Retail Store
Let's imagine that you have a retail store, and no website.
We would suggest starting new portal for your retail business to avoid having numerous Google docs and Excel files and put everything under one roof, and finally leave the situation when "I know a man who knows a man" who knows what was ordered, and when it comes to your warehouse.
Please check below what Drupal as a technology can bring to your business tomorrow.
Retail: Starting New Franchise
When making your decision, please review related statistics listed here: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/75912
- Retail brings 38% of US GNP (Gross National Product), that is more than $3 trillion.
- More than 1 million retailing companies operate more than 1.4 million retail establishments in the USA, according to The US National Retail Federation.
From All Above What We Can Do for You
Retail business involves a lot of activity and requires a lot of efforts for tracking purchases, inventory, and what is more important it starts from idea how to get new customers for your store. A lot of networks, like Metro Cash & Carry, or Walmart also started on-line stores to support on-line purchases and engage customers who are interested in placing a quick order on-line. Such type of customers usually has the same list of purchases (based on favorite brands) each week and prefer to avoid spending real time in a real supermarket. So to say, such resource helps you to reach young busy people who hate shopping in real supermarket and prefer shopping on-line.
What Makes Our Offer Unique: Mobile App with QR codes
We would suggest considering a native mobile app with an option to create QR code banners and add such banners to your regular marketing and promo materials so for example when you decide to place banner somewhere, you can always place special price and special set of products on the banner with QR code allowing to place order on-line immediately, from smartphone.
Why Drupal as a Technology for Retail portal
Let me share our thoughts on why we suggest considering Drupal for this type of projects:
- Option to create multi-language multistore.
- Option to set up several user roles with different UI.
- Option to add any functionality that might be required, later.
For example, when it comes to the retail chain, there is an option to create multisite that covers:
a) Corporate portal
- for time tracking for employees, agreement tracking for merchandisers and history tracking for any other external partners, allowing to create statistics for all interactions starting from correspondence, contracts, payments tracking etc
- Here you can create orders for your partners (manufacturers, merchandisers etc and the order will have a product code, a number of items, characteristics etc).
b) E-commerce portion where regular users will be placing orders on-line, attracting new customers from those who is making their purchases mostly on-line and interested in saving time spent for purchasing products for household consumptions
Here we can create a lot of things like special offers, gifts and coupon system, a wish list, set up a blog, bring traffic for special offers (with special prices, integrate social networks to share something interesting in social networks, etc), all Drupal e-commerce functionality is here for you.
c) Multistore architecture where owner assigns separate subsite for each next store in the chain, for example when you would be willing to start several substores and would like to bring some unique layout for each one, there is an option to create that based on the same database and same product list (but with another custom layouts, that would be a fit for particular store in particular area).
d) A responsive mobile version should be created, as it was mentioned recently that Google is planning to switch to Mobile first prioritizing for indexing pages, which means that website with mobile pages will always have higher positions under search results, as announced at the conference recently.
e) Drupal backend for mobile app. Drupal can be also used as a backend for a native mobile app.
There are a lot of opportunities that comes from here - you can offer mobile app for your partners - (merchandisers, they can generate their reports from such app, one can also track time per task tracked by employees when it is required).
There are some Drupal e-commerce templates on the market.
Drupal as a technology brings you an option to start web portal and develop large-scale resource supporting all activity that you may have with Products, Prices, Personnel and Promotions.
If you have any questions on creating web portal for retail, please feel free to send me your request.
P. S. Please also check below interesting stats charts, by pwc.com (Source: www.pwc.com/gx/en/retail-consumer/publications/assets/total-retail-global-report.pdf)
Regards,
Jen Zorina
Wise team
