Some languages remain universally understood, regardless of time or boundaries: music, food, art, and of course – retail management! From an operative standpoint, the foundation remains the same: convenience, service, customer retention, and loyalty. Of course, the process of laying this foundation down is where the language may have a different dialect. Still, the outcome tends to be the same, and we can establish pillars for retail, whether brick-and-mortar or digital.
The specific skillset that becomes engrained in a retail brick-and-mortar store manager is definite, but it can be challenging to describe, especially to outsiders. It’s about using past data to work within the current moment while predicting future successes and sales trends, always anticipating the next step, but without reacting in such a way as to abandon previous success drivers. Traditional retail managers can give a retail store a competitive edge; they live and breathe the data and the business. Digital brand managers ensure that everything is running smoothly. They’re assessing business or account health daily, measuring KPIs, training talent, and operating within unique timelines and budgets – and doing this all with important data laced with some intuitive nuances.
Coming from a brick-and-mortar background, the transition to online account management can seem daunting because there’s nothing to reach out and grab hold of. Trust in the “less tangible” naturally comes with e-commerce; each team member’s accountability has to be heightened since the allowed reaction time to fix a mistake is drastically shorter. The era of instant results is now! Brands must stay engaged with customers around the clock by responding to a shipping problem, issuing a refund, or budgeting for consistent advertising returns. With Amazon especially, there’s no open or close of the business day. A poor review, demanding email, or urgent stock issue could come up well after the typical workday. It must be handled as quickly as possible, especially if the customer’s satisfaction is at risk.
Looking at the foundation again, we can splice out how principles remain the same, but the process needs to adapt:
Convenience
Instead of encompassing business hours to overlap with everyone’s shopping availability, now you’re always available. Nobody needs to worry about rushing after work to make it out before stores close when they can pop on Amazon during their lunch break (or, as the data suggests, throughout the workday). Ensuring stock is ready for this demand can be tricky. In brick and mortar, customer selection and choice can be guided by shifting visual displays to keep preferred products as a focal point, calling other locations, or offering site-to-store shipping. On Amazon, no stock immediately gives the sale to a competitor. We now monitor sales trends in real time and use that data to predict how many we need to get through the next few weeks – we use a forty-two days in stock target. We must consider the time of year, advertising efforts, transport times, etc.
Service
Fulfilling through Amazon alleviates a lot of this stress, and thanks to their 24/7 customer help center, buyers can shop more accessibly, knowing there’s always going to be a resolution. Now and then, buyers reach out to sellers directly, allowing us to correct mistakes or gather feedback. Regardless of the topic, customers reaching out want to be heard. Providing active customer service will always be a critical part of the business. Carefully ensuring an email response balances informative and friendly tones is an art form in and of itself.
Customer Loyalty
In store, it’s natural to spark loyalty in a customer or learn their specific needs or wants. Get them in front of the correct product, make conversation, be a friendly face, and a relationship is begun! Anyone with brick-and-mortar experience knows that sometimes you have a customer that comes back to shop with your team specifically. The consumer market wants a personalized shopping experience; creating this with a face-to-face rapport is easy. Although there are unique challenges in replicating this relationship in the digital marketplace, designing consumer-friendly brand stores and ads builds trust; the more your brand can be shown, the easier it is to replicate that physical store relationship.
From first-hand experience, I can confirm that many retail skills are universal, and those honed retail instincts can help pave the way for successful brand management in the digital space.
Do you feel you should be achieving a higher level of success on the platform or want to get some honest insight? It’s always free to contact us for a listing or account discussion. Kaidako’s team has over a century of e-commerce experience. We are experts at bringing clarity and calm to what may seem like a calamitous marketplace. Discover why our client retention rate is 100%.
About the author: Samantha Jamgochian is a Key Account Manager and Ad-spend Specialist at Kaidako, an Amazon-centric agency helping brands and manufacturers realize the full potential of direct-to-consumer sales on Amazon. Passionate about understanding what drives consumer behavior, Samantha has used her decade of brick-and-mortar retail experience to drive double-digit annualized growth for many of her digital clients.
