At the height of the pandemic, shoppers bought more online and often picked up orders in-store or at curbside to minimize infection risk. Retailers gained customers through omnichannel offerings like buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS). 

And it’s not just giant retail chains leveraging their physical locations to increase sales and win new customers. Even some retailers with just a single store introduced options that catered to consumers shopping more online during the pandemic. Giving customers a choice to shop online or in-store is helping these retailers win new customers and positioning them for post-pandemic success. 

One example is Moriarty’s Gem Art, a jewelry retailer in Crown Point, Indiana, whose online sales increased to 55% of its business today from about 30% pre-pandemic. Many residents who previously would come into the store ordered online for home delivery or requested curbside pickup, which the retailer introduced during the pandemic, says Jeff Moriarty, the family-run business’ marketing manager.  

Omnichannel options give shoppers more opportunities to convert 

Moriarty’s Gem Art closed its only physical store from March 2020 to August that year. That was partly because 40% of its sales come from people older than 50, a demographic that worried about shopping in person early in the pandemic, Moriarty says. 

With its store closed, the retailer focused all its time online, adding more products to MoreGems.com, the retailer’s website, and doing live shows online to display and sell new items, Moriarty says. It was easier to make that online-first push because the retailer had been growing its website for more than 20 years.

Moriarty’s Gem Art launched its website in 1999. It used Microsoft FrontPage as its HTML editor and website administration tool. Although viewers could see the jewelry retailer’s products on its website, MoreGems.com, they couldn’t purchase them online.

“If you wanted to order anything, you had to call,” says Jeff Moriarty, the family-run business’ marketing manager. “It was kind of a difficult process, but people still did. People were finding us. We were getting a sale maybe once every few weeks. It was nothing big.”

Moriarty says online sales started to pick up in 2004 when he began digital marketing. Before Google became the paid search king, Moriarty used paid search players from the era like Overture.com and GoTo.com. That’s when MoreGems.com started getting more traffic to its site and a couple of sales a week. 

Playing the long game pays off

Around 2006 and 2007, the company was making sales on its website almost daily. 

“Now, we’re at maybe four to five sales a day, which doesn’t seem huge,” Moriarty says. “But our average order is probably over $2,000, so it’s quite a large amount.”

Moriarty’s Gem Art’s average order value (AOV) normally drops during the holidays, Moriarty says, as the retailer offers less expensive items to hit a broader market. The retailer has “a ton of $500-range items, which normally sell very well, but of course, drops our AOV,” he says.

And those MoreGems.com customers can complete their purchase online, rather than calling in, as customers would more than a decade ago. Plus, Moriarty’s has a customer list with addresses, emails and phone numbers and that has grown since the website began in 1999. So, the retailer began pushing its online buying experience to local customers during the pandemic.

“We never shipped out so many things to our town,” he says. “We were in Crown Point, shipping to Crown Point addresses, which was kind of strange. Some people also did pickup, so we would bring it out to them, out to their car. That was another option we offered. We tried to make it as easy as possible for people to still shop with us, but not actually have to shop in-store.”

So, too, are North America’s Top 500 online retailers by web sales. Convenient pickup options are becoming more common. In 2020, 69.1% of retail chains in the Top 500 offered BOPIS. Now, 79.4% of them offer it this year, Digital Commerce 360 data shows. Even bigger of a jump: only 10.3% of the retail chains in the Top 1000 offered curbside pickup in 2020, but now 61.8% do in 2022. 

Omnichannel offerings like in-store and curbside pickup are not without reward for retailers. Top 1000 retailers offering omnichannel services had a 3.33% median conversion rate in 2021. That’s higher than the median conversion rate of the Top 1000 as a whole (2.84%), and also considerably more than those that did not have any omnichannel offerings (2.66%). 

“Everything’s connected now,” Moriarty says. “Our in-store inventory is connected with our website. Anything that sells online or sells in-store, it all works together. You can purchase online, pick up in store. We even have customers that come in who purchase in-store, but they want it delivered someplace. It’s all done online through us there, so it kind of goes back and forth.”

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