Online sales play a pivotal role in today’s modern business landscape. With the preference and use of online shopping growing exponentially among consumers of all industries1, you face missing out on all that potential revenue and growth, should you not have an online store. Things like marketing opportunities, wider reach, and diversifying your revenue streams are just a few of the rewards that online sales can yield, but where do you even start? Here’s Vagaro’s answer: the Online Shopping Cart. Let’s see how it works.
Online Sales: Don’t Lose While You Snooze
As mentioned, online sales are key to your success as a business owner in today's digitally focused landscape. Online sales allow you to reach audiences beyond the constraints of a physical location, which increases your potential revenue and broadens your customer base. By offering services or goods online, your business is essentially active 24/7. Unlike actual brick-and-mortar locations, an online store doesn’t need to have set hours. This means that you can still generate revenue even if your physical studio or shop is closed.
The convenience that online sales and shopping offers is paramount to clients in today’s market when everyone is pressed for time. Allowing your customers to browse and purchase from you within the comfort of their home, on their own time, leads to increased satisfaction and loyalty to your business. While online sales provide a way for you to practically make money in your sleep, there’s another tool that comes with it that allows you to diversify your revenue streams even more: recurring payments.
Before we continue:
Offering gift cards online is a great way to instantly boost your revenue. How so? Well, each time a gift card is purchased from your business, you get those funds right away—even if your client doesn’t use the gift card. Learn more about the benefits of gift card sales.
Recurring Payments: Memberships & Packages
The Online Shopping Cart enables you to seamlessly sell the memberships and packages offered by your business, no matter the hour. By setting up recurring payments for these offerings, your clients' cards will be automatically charged at the frequency you've set. This not only streamlines the payment process, but also ensures a consistent and predictable stream of revenue for your business.
In times of financial uncertainty, having this reliable income from recurring payments provides an invaluable foundation to lean on. Recurring payments or membership programs also contribute to increased consumer loyalty1 due to the convenience they provide, resulting in reduced attrition for you as a business owner.
Deposits/Capture Credit Card: Protect Your Funds
No matter the industry, no-shows and cancellations can be excruciatingly frustrating. After all, cancellations waste time, money, and resources that often aren’t available to spare in the first place. To protect themselves from that, many businesses turn to deposits or credit card capture requirements upon booking. Thankfully, the Online Shopping Cart allows you to do just that.
Here’s why it’s important: Requiring a deposit or credit card at your business allows you to mitigate the financial risk of cancellations since you’re receiving part—or all (up to you)—of the payment upfront. Not to mention, clients are also less likely to cancel or simply not show to begin with when they know they’ve already paid money for it. The use of credit card capture at your business also helps with streamlining the overall checkout process, too, since there’s no need to manually enter or swipe a card, saving you even more time down the road.
Vagaro’s Online Shopping Cart provides businesses with the tools necessary to stay ahead of shifting environments and unspoken industry standards at a fraction of the cost of most online retail services. See what you can accomplish with a complimentary 30-day trial with Vagaro—the software that has your back, every step of the way.
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