Shops must learn to manage the transition to online sales – Kevin Buckle

It is clear both from my own experience and speaking to others that online sales are going to play a far bigger part in the future of the high street than they did before the pandemic.

I don’t mean bigger businesses who will have their websites operating to a large extent separately to shops but those who may need to fill in any dead time in a shop by processing and promoting online sales. The key thing here is whether there will be enough useful dead time to successfully help with online or whether time will just be spent dealing with the new requirements that need to be complied with for a shop to be open.

There is no doubt too that social distancing stipulations are going to be a key factor in whether businesses are viable at all. I’m lucky in that we have a fairly big shop and while there undoubtedly certainly was a busy time between around 4pm and 5.30pm we would probably not lose out too much by the restrictions.

However, even more important than any social distancing will be that the people will no longer be about at that busy time as there won’t be commuters on their way home from work and now it also appears that students will not be passing by either.

While the bigger concerns do involve high street shops via click and collect this is not a huge part of online business for many so to justify the overheads of a shop those businesses will need to find time in the day to bring in revenue. Another factor that has become more important, especially to those shops that have increased their online sales, is the amount of questions that can be generated. The problem is that lots of people are “working” from home with nothing better to do than wonder why that thing they ordered on Friday night hasn’t arrived on Monday morning.

For me we do get our fair share of people wasting our time but there are lots of sensible questions about shipping larger orders to different countries, for instance, and this is something that can be fitted into a spare five minutes.

Of course the other problem is you never know when the next customer will appear and it is certainly always a fact that all I have to do is close up to nip out and get some lunch for customers who have been nowhere to be seen for the last hour to turn up in force.

Luckily Avalanche is well known worldwide and has been selling online in one way or another for many years so we had a firm base to build from. Some I know with perfectly good shops are finding it hard to build up a worthwhile online presence from scratch and even for somebody like ourselves not everything works so well online. We were doing fantastically well with our range of T-shirts in the shop but to offer the same selection online would take up a large amount of time without great reward.

The weakness with shopping online is that it is great for finding what you know you want but a shop is far better for browsing and stumbling across things and while we do sell many T-shirts through word of mouth just as many sell to folk who had no thought of buying a shirt when they came in.

Shops do indeed still have much to offer but in the short term at least it is not going to be easy.