For multichannel brands, Where-to-Buy solutions offer undeniable advantages to drive eCommerce on their websites. These solutions propel shoppers into the checkout process with the freedom to buy through the retailer they prefer.
Still, not every brand website with a Where-to-Buy option performs equally. Here are 10 best practices to get the most value out of your website’s Where-to-Buy solutions.
What brand marketers need to know about Where-to-Buy solutions
Before jumping into creative best practices, let’s define what a Where-to-Buy solution is. With Where-to-Buy technology, multichannel brands can offer a seamless path to purchase to their website visitors by dynamically displaying a list of available retailers that sell their products. A Where-to-Buy solution can take the form of a ‘buy now’ button to let shoppers click through and directly check out with the retailer they prefer.
10 creative best practices for your website’s Where-to-Buy solutions
Here’s how to design a Where-to-Buy experience that provides frictionless shopping experiences to accelerate sales:
1. Make checkout as easy as possible.Create a CTA that’s clear, easy to find, and always within sight. This has been the key for the dermo-cosmetics brand, Bioderma. On the brand website, a shopping basket follows visitors around from page to page as they browse products. This allows shoppers to drop products into their baskets while they’re fresh in their minds. Consumers also don’t have to interrupt their website visit to search for the checkout page, which reduces clicks and frustration, allowing them to access shopping options easily at any time.
2. Give shoppers multiple buying options.
Shoppers want the freedom to buy when, where, and with the retailer they prefer. The food brand ZEGO nailed this concept when they integrated their Where-to-Buy solution into their Product Detail Pages (PDP). When shoppers visit the brand’s site, they have three different buying options:
- They can buy directly from ZEGO’s site.
- They can buy from their favorite online retailer.
- They can find physical stores that sell their products nearby.
By giving shoppers more buying options, ZEGO is capturing more sales, both online and offline.
3. Cut down clicks.
To maximize eCommerce sales, make buying as easy as possible. Neutrogena skincare brand has built a masterful example of seamless shopping with its website in Spain.
The website displays all of the shopper’s different buying options prominently on product pages. That includes a clear visual map of locations for nearby stores that sell Neutrogena’s products. Because all of the checkout options are right in front of them, buyers can quickly scan their choices, make a decision, click, and buy.
4. Simplify search for shoppers.
If shoppers have to hunt for products for long, they’re likely to give up. That’s why top-selling multichannel brands provide search and filter options.
When an Oral Hygiene brand implemented this creative best practice, its sales jumped. They used MikMak 3.0 to add filter and search options to their website. After moving to MikMak 3.0, its Purchase Intent Rate, a proprietary metric indicating the share of shoppers likely to buy, climbed 1.9x and its conversion rate lept by 9x.
5. Test your designs.
Shoppers’ preferences and habits are constantly shifting. A Where-to-Buy solution helps multichannel brands garner insights on shopper behavior and identify their best-performing creative assets and strategies. Test different designs and approaches and measure the outcome by collecting first-party data with your Where-to-Buy solution to learn what works best for your specific audiences.
This approach unearthed surprising results for a global Beauty brand. After A/B testing evergreen content against a holiday-themed message, the brand was surprised to see that its evergreen ads outperformed its seasonal creative ads. That gave their marketing team the information they needed to optimize their messages according to their strategic objectives.
6. Eliminate out-of-stock dead-ends.
When a shopper's buying experience is interrupted by out-of-stock items, it can derail the sale. You can avoid these shopping dead-ends by designing your site creatively.
For instance, the Vitamin and supplement brand, Olly, automatically redirects sales to retailers when their Direct-to-Consumer eCommerce shop runs out-of-stock on their website. The site displays a “Where-to-Buy” message that’s populated by MikMak Commerce. It shows available online and physical shopping locations, so the shopper can easily follow through on their buying decision.
7. Include offline buying options.
If your brand doesn’t give eCommerce shoppers the option to buy products in a physical location, you could be missing out on a huge slice of sales. You can sell more in-store products by adding a Global Store Locator to your website.
These tools track your shopper’s location, display nearby stores that sell your products, and even give shoppers directions. With MikMak offline sales reporting (part of a partnership with Circana) eCommerce marketers can also track offline sales and identify new shopping trends that could increase sales even more.
8. Use direct add-to-cart buttons.
An easy way to encourage shoppers to fill up their virtual carts is to include a direct add-to-cart option on your website. This lets your shopper drop a product into their cart with a single click. It’s also an easy way to capture first-party shopping data and quickly spot emerging shopping behaviors.
9. Bring products to life with shoppable recipes.
You can encourage faster purchases by adding shoppable recipes to your website. Shoppable recipes let shoppers buy directly from your recipe content. With a single click, they can purchase from their favorite retailer and start cooking.
10. Control your brand’s shopping experience with Headless Commerce.
With traditional eCommerce websites, shoppers are susceptible to dead-end experiences, including out-of-stock items. You can entirely customize your site’s Where-to-Buy solution and eliminate dead-end experiences by using MikMak’s Headless Commerce API. This technology relies on a new site infrastructure that separates the front-end and back-end of the site. That means you can seize full creative control over your brand’s website and quickly make the changes that will draw in the most customers.
Learn more tricks to accelerating Where-to-Buy sales
Want to learn more of the secrets to designing top-performing Where-to-Buy eCommerce websites? Read our full guide, How to Accelerate Sales with Where-to-Buy Solutions on Brand Websites, to discover how to use your brand’s website to maximize sales.
