Make New Revenue Streams with an eCommerce store on Your Website

Restauranteurs, out of the necessity of surviving turbulent times, have become way more savvy in the art of finding other ways of bringing additional revenue into their restaurants. One really simple way to create a new revenue stream is to add an eCommerce store to your website. It enables your restaurant to strengthen its brand identity with branded merchandise, gives you the ability to sell to folks that don’t live in your restaurant’s immediate vicinity, and provides a way to expand your restaurant’s brand into new markets not to mention creating a new revenue stream.

But wait “I already offer online ordering on my website, and we use a 3^rd party delivery company”.
Offering online ordering on your website is a fantastic way to future-proof your restaurant, but please tread carefully with those 3^rd party providers who promise the stars and deliver a very expensive light bulb (but that is a whole other blog). An eCommerce store is quite different from online ordering on your website. Online ordering allows customers to order food items to be prepared fresh from your kitchen for pickup or delivery typically that same day; while eCommerce allows customers to purchase items such as branded merchandise, non-perishables, gift pack items and other products through the website for pickup or to be shipped to their home.  Think of the difference as being “hot food today” verses gift or specialty items for delivery next week.

Wow! That sounds interesting. What should I look for in an eCommerce solution to grow my revenue and loyalty?
There are many solutions out there for eCommerce, but we recommend that your solution do a minimum of the following:

• Sell Gift Cards, Merchandise, Tickets, Gift Baskets
• Collect Online Deposit Payments for Events
• Secure Checkout
• Flexible Shipping Options and dates
• Volume Pricing Options
• Product Bundling
• Simple Stock Control Management
• Manage and Organize through a central Digital Marketing center
• Customized Pricing with Tax Configuration Options
• Ability to sign up and pay for subscriptions (Example: wine, cheese, and coffee clubs)

However, as important as the feature list above is, what’s even more important, as with all parts of your digital marketing solution is that your eCommerce store is linked to your customer database and your automated marketing engine.  We at Spillover believe in two core fundamentals in Digital Marketing - “Audience Growth” and “Effective Communication”.  The eCommerce Store is a great way to capture customer data, profile activity and set-up an automated rules engine to handle future communication “Hey we saw you ordered our Turkey gift pack last Thanksgiving, as we are closing in on the big day again this year do you want to book another gift set before they are gone?”

For more information on eCommerce solutions and how to integrate them into your restaurant’s website as well as the all-important back-end customers database, please reach out to us here for a free, no-hassle evaluation of your restaurant’s website and overall Digital Marketing platform.