L.A. Weekly*Brand Partner Content*
2021 is a year full of possibilities.
After a year of planning and dreaming about all we would do once the city reopened, it’s finally time to put those goals in the forefront of our mind and make them a reality. As retail business owners, it’s the perfect time to reinvest back into your store and make the improvements you’ve always planned to. With the community of Los Angeles closer than ever, local brick-and-mortar retail businesses are receiving the attention – and financial support – they deserve.
If you have your own business, L.A. is one of the best places to do so. While there are so many intuitive advantages to running your own business in L.A., there are still so many aspects that require the knowledge and guidance of entrepreneurial experts. Thankfully, Shopify has filled that gap for us with a localized guide for Los Angeles retailer business owners called Your Guide to Selling Local in Los Angeles.
The guide begins by recognizing that the way society makes purchases has fundamentally changed, with the retail landscape being dramatically transformed almost overnight due to the pandemic. While this transformation was no doubt a devastating blow to all business owners, it has also produced the positive effect by helping people realize the value of shopping locally, with 65% of consumers today supporting small business.
People shop locally for several reasons: to strengthen the local economy, to help support local job creation, to invest in their community. According to Shopify’s comprehensive guide to selling local in Los Angeles, consumer behavior and intent shows that people are trying to buy less from big box retailers and marketplaces like Amazon. In fact, Shopify’s research shows that 30% of Americans want to shop from local business more often.
Consumers can only shop local if businesses are set up for success, with the ability to offer competitive pricing and shopping convenience while also providing a uniquely local experience. Perhaps the most important key to running a successful local brick-and-mortar business is ensuring that L.A. shoppers can find you, and once they do, can be converted from interested browsers to loyal, paying customers.
In Your Guide to Selling Local in Los Angeles, Shopify teaches you how to attract, sell to, and keep your local customers. From insights into shop local trends to tactics you can try today and examples of merchants in our L.A. community who excel at growing their local retail business, this handy guide has it all, including tips on how to best utilize Shopify to your economic advantage with a free trial to get you started.
What is Shopify? Shopify is a subscription-based software that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products. Shopify store owners can also sell in physical locations using Shopify POS, our point-of-sale app and accompanying hardware. If you’re a Shopify merchant with both an online and physical presence, your inventory and stock get synced so you can manage your store(s) from one account, on any device.
As you’ve likely gathered, Shopify is a valuable mentor for all those looking to create their own success. To further prove their helpfulness, they’ve broken down their free guide into shopping locally into three sections: attracting more local customers, selling to local customers, keeping local customers.
How To Attract More Local Customers
Your Guide to Selling Local in Los Angeles highlights three crucial actions to attract more local customers:
- Use local SEO
- Create a local marketing plan
- Build a digital marketing strategy
Want to go into more detail? Download Shopify’s free guide on how to attract more local customers here.
Tips On Selling To Local Customers
When it comes to selling to local retail customers Your Guide to Selling Local in Los Angeles proves how integral Shopify is to running a successful business. With this guide, Shopify teaches you how to:
- Improve the in-store experience
- Make the retail checkout experience faster and easier
- Create an omnichannel shopping experience
- Give customers more delivery and pick up options
- Provide appointment shopping
Need more info? Download Shopify’s free guide with tips on selling to local customers here.
Ways To Keep Local Customers
Keeping local customers is the secret ingredient to every successful local business. Your Guide to Selling Local in Los Angeles walks you through Shopify’s suggestions for:
- Creating a loyalty program
- Encouraging customer feedback and reviews
- Building a social community
- Hosting online events
- Continuing the conversation post-purchase
Curious on how to do all this? Download Shopify’s free guide detailing ways to keep local customers here.
The guide also has case studies, following the journeys of three flourishing L.A. merchants – Treehaus, Gorjana, and tokyobike – to provide deeper insights on how to cater to the Los Angeles market. You’ll hear from real people on what they did to come out of the pandemic economically strong, with specific details on how to best use the Shopify platform to your advantage.
The time to make your dreams of running a booming city business are now. With a free guide and free trial, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Learn more here.
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