Question

Topic: Branding

Online To Real Store

Posted by Anonymous on 5/8/2009 at 7:53 AM ET 250 Points
Hello, we are one of the succesfuls online brand now planning to start our real outlet store in Houston but the thing is that we cannot keep such low price at real store as we offer online. My question is how to satisfy store customers so that they don't argue on price. For info we are into high end fashion business having our products manufactured in South east Asia. Our stores are opening in tx, by, ca, fl united states.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 5/8/2009 at 8:43 PM Accepted
    Isn't it a little late to be asking this question? Do you have a business plan for your bricks-and-mortar stores? What did you expect to do about the price discrepancy? Or did you not know that your overhead would be higher?

    I would think that the convenience of being able to come to a real store, see/touch/feel and try on the merchandise, take it home with you the same day with no shipping charges, should be worth a lot to a segment of your customers.

    You are not the first company to face this issue. Look at what others do for bricks-and-mortar pricing when they also sell online. I'll bet there are examples in your own industry.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 5/9/2009 at 8:31 AM Member
    If customers argue on price it's because you haven't provided real value for your offering. As Michael mentions, convenience, immediacy, easy returns, touch, etc. are all tangible benefits. Your store has another benefit - it'll no doubt boost your online business (at least in the Houston area) because of name recognition.
  • Posted on 5/9/2009 at 2:42 PM Author
    In 2004 we started up our online store... We have been selling high-end fashion through our website for 5 years now. We have customers in 63 countries. Mainly cusotmers come from the United States, Canada, UK, Some European and Middle Eastern countries.

    In 2004 we started up our online store... We have been selling high-end fashion through our website for 5 years now. We have customers in 63 countries. Mainly customers come from the United States, Canada, UK, Some European and Middle Eastern countries. We became the leader in this business and have been the TOP RANKED online store. We have over 23,000 satisfied customers so far.

    While receiving customer service emails and phone calls we found out that many customers want to see our products before they buy. Due to price factor as well as state-of-the-art design customer service we were able to convince those offline shoppers to purchase from our online shop. However, I always felt the need of having a real store. Keeping this in mind I designed a franchise program and to see the results I put some information on our website. In just one year we have received over 300 applications. Many customers are moving forward to purchase our franchise. Average investment on a franchise is US$100,000.

    Now we ran across the franchise structure and modelling issue. So we first decided to open our own model store so that we can process franchise applications by showing our own successful store.

    Now when the store is open we are receiving an overwhelming response but of course our idea was to keep ourselves an online business so the store prices are higher than online. We are seeing that a number of customers are getting annoyed by our physical store price and they are putting their orders online after seeing the products at our own store.

    I am now a bit confused what to do... I have already decided to make an exclusive line so that the same product is not available for online sale. However, huge number of customers still come with product print outs from our website and they wish to place their orders at website price. Now if we charge the same website price then I am a bit scared that the exclusive line may suffer. Our online store has over 3,000 designs so obviously if we started offering services physically for our online business then we will be directly hitting our exclusive product line business.

    I am in search of an idea so that I can smoothly run both the projects! Maybe a new marketing plan for our physical store business! Any ideas will be highly appreciated. I may join hands with person who gives me the best idea and can designate him/her to work on it for me. I’d appreciate a marketing plan and good presentation so that I can look into this further.

    Kind regards,

    khawer.sumaira@gmail.com
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