1. E-commerce is growing

E-commerce is by far the most significant growth area in Denmark, and that trend doesn't look set to reverse any time soon. Physical retail, on the other hand, is heading downhill, with shop closures leaving high streets empty even in larger provincial towns.

But what's behind the shop closures?

Quite simply, Danes are increasingly shopping online. In fact, 80 per cent of Danes have shopped online in the past year. That makes Denmark one of the EU’s clear front-runners when it comes to e-commerce.

And it's not just the coronavirus crisis that has sent Danes to the digital checkouts. The growth of online shopping has been a constant for the past ten years, and will most likely remain so in the years ahead.

That's why investing in a webshop can pay off. It's an investment in the future of your business.

2. Win customers outside your local area

A physical shop depends on customers being nearby. A webshop doesn't. Your range is always within reach of customers, wherever they are in the world. So your customers don't need to visit your shop in person to meet their shopping needs.

At Amplify, we have a client who runs the physical wine and spirits shop Østerbro Vin in Copenhagen. But resourceful as he is, he chose to supplement his physical shop with a webshop, a choice that has given him an audience stretching geographically far beyond the Copenhagen city limits.

That means that the other day the wine merchant sold a bottle of whisky for almost DKK 700 to a customer in south-west Jutland, a sale that would hardly have happened if the customer had had to drive across the country to reach the physical shop in Copenhagen.

The point is that with a webshop, you can attract customers who are far from your local area. That gives you a much larger potential audience.

3. It's easier to stand out from the competition

Let's pretend you have a shop out in the physical, analogue world, which you probably do, since you're ploughing through this post.

In this hypothetical scenario, though, your shop sells high-quality bags. Unfortunately, in your pursuit of uncompromising quality, you've neglected your shopfront, which therefore looks anonymous and uninviting.

Next door is your competitor, who also sells bags. Her bags, however, are nowhere near the quality of the ones you sell in your shop.

Your competitor, on the other hand, has made her shopfront and visual marketing a priority, including an eye-catching shopfront with special offers, product prices and relevant information about her range.

For that very reason, customers flock into her shop, and they often leave with a new bag under their arm.

So what's my point with this hypothetical example?
Obviously, that your potential customers will be more likely to visit your shop if:

1) it looks visually stronger than your competitors' shops
2) your customers know what to expect before they've even visited the shop.

The same applies to a webshop. But with a webshop, it's considerably easier to stand out from your competitors. You don't need a master's degree in visual communication to make a stronger visual impression.

But you (or your agency) do need a little knowledge of structured data.

I won't go into detail about what structured data is in this post, as my colleague Peter has already written an excellent and very accessible introduction to structured data.

But I will briefly outline how structured data can make your webshop more visible in Google's search results (SERP), and not least how it can make it more appealing for your customers to visit your webshop in particular.

An example of visual marketing with structured data

With structured data, you can give your customers relevant information in the search result before they've even visited your webshop, just as the shop owner mentioned above gives her customers relevant information on her shopfront.

Ultimately, this can mean more traffic to your business, and with it a greater chance of sales. In SEO speak, we call it increasing your click rate (or click-through rate/CTR). Or in plain English: increasing the likelihood of getting more clicks.

Below, you can see poster retailer Permild & Rosengreen's search result on Google. Using structured data, the poster retailer has given its customers a quick overview of some of the webshop's categories right in the search result. Not least, customers can see that the shop has impressive customer reviews.

Permild & Rosengreen have made it easy for their customers to decide whether the webshop is worth a visit before they've even visited it. That way, Permild & Rosengreen stand out visually from the competition, and they have increased their chances of getting more visitors.

If you want your webshop to stand out from the crowd using structured data, you're always welcome to contact Amplify.

4. Reach the right audience

Let's once again imagine that you own a bag shop. Thousands of people walk past every day. But very few of them are interested in buying a bag. Even fewer will actually visit your shop, let alone buy a bag.

But what if I told you that every single passer-by could be a potential customer?

With a webshop, you have that opportunity. You can tailor your marketing to specific segments through online marketing, and in doing so turn every “passer-by” into a potential customer.

For example, you can promote your products to existing customers through email marketing, and you can reach brand-new customers through paid advertising (PPC) and organic advertising (SEO).

Both organic and paid advertising make it possible for you to reach the top of Google's search results for specific keywords. That means you'll be found when, for example, a user googles “bags”.

You can also use so-called remarketing to market to customers who have previously visited your webshop without completing a purchase.

In other words, you can tailor your marketing so it reaches customers at every stage of the buying journey.

So as a webshop owner, you have more marketing advantages than you do as an “ordinary” shopkeeper.

Want to read about a real example of a webshop that has succeeded thanks to online marketing? Then read about how Amplify helped the webshop Butik24 give its sales a solid shot in the arm with extensive online advertising.

5. Automatic sales, around the clock

One of the problems with having a physical shop is that your sales depend on you and your staff being physically present in the shop. And you can only be open x hours a day; you and your employees do, after all, need to sleep and have time for family and leisure.

To put it bluntly, basic human needs are to blame for you missing out on a lot of sales. But what if I told you that you could get an employee who didn't need to sleep or socialise, and who was ready to serve your customers around the clock?

That employee already exists. And you needn't worry about having the Danish Working Environment Authority breathing down your neck for letting this seemingly tireless employee work around the clock.
Because the employee I'm talking about is, of course, your webshop. Your webshop isn't held back by trivial physical and social needs. It handles all order and payment processing completely automatically. So your customers can shop in your webshop around the clock, late at night or early in the morning.

It benefits both you and your customers. Your customers can shop at their leisure, whenever it suits them, and you keep revenue coming in all the time, even when you're asleep, relaxing on the sofa in the evening or playing badminton on a Sunday.

It's a win-win situation.

6. You keep costs down, both your own and your customers'

Now, I'm not saying a physical shop and a webshop are opposites; one can usefully supplement and complement the other, and there are of course service advantages to having a physical shop.

That said, there are clear financial advantages to focusing on online retail. For example, your premises and utility costs will be lower, because you don't have to spend energy heating and lighting a shop with rent that's as high as the location is attractive.

But your customers benefit financially too. For example, they'll be able to shop more cheaply, because your lower costs allow you to sell your goods for less.

In other words, focusing on e-commerce makes financial sense, both for you and your customers.

7. A webshop is easy to manage and update

Does the thought of running a webshop instantly bring on a bout of technophobia?

Don't worry…

You don't need any experience with coding, programming or web design to become a webshop owner. There are several user-friendly eCommerce platforms that make it easy to run a webshop.

In short, an eCommerce platform is the system where you manage content, sales and payments on your webshop, and there are countless to choose from. These include WooCommerce and Shopify, which are by far the two largest providers.

At Amplify, we mainly work in Shopify when we build webshops for our clients. We do so because Shopify has an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard where you can quickly get an overview of orders, stock levels and sales statistics. The dashboard also makes it easy to create new product and category pages and add engaging, search-engine-friendly SEO copy.

Shopify also has well-developed customer support and full integration with Google Shopping, and you don't need to think about updating plugins on your webshop.

And Shopify is stable. So you don't need to worry about the system crashing under heavy load around Christmas, Black Friday and other busy periods.

That's not to say that a Shopify webshop is the best solution for you. This post isn't an advert for Shopify. There are pros and cons to every eCommerce platform, and in the end it comes down to preferences and needs.

If you'd like an overview of the pros and cons of two of the biggest systems, Shopify and WooCommerce, I can highly recommend reading the post “Woocommerce vs. Shopify, which should you choose?”, written by my colleague Tobias.

Get help with your webshop

Do you need help with your webshop? Then we'd be happy to help you move forward. At Amplify, you'll meet web designers and online marketing specialists who are ready to get your webshop firmly on its feet, and not least make sure it stays on its feet.

Why you need a webshop