Providing online/offline experiences in your retail and Direct Selling businesses can increase demand for products while appearing convenient for end-customers who prefer to make their own choice of what channel to use to purchase your goods or services. This benefits the business by allowing it to scale and grow with the reach of its network in exchange for a sales margin while still gaining knowledge and first-hand information about its end-customers. 

Having an omnichannel sales presence while recognizing the sales of representatives and affiliates and, at the same time, allowing the brand to strengthen its presence in electronic commerce implies special attention to the design of the checkout experience, depending on the business model:

Build successful checkout experiences for businesses with corporate and representative sales channels:

To maintain a healthy balance between corporate sales channels and representatives, businesses with multiple sales channels need to focus on optimizing their checkout process.

To do so, consider designing strategies that take into account the perception of competition between the corporate channels and the sales representatives and, guarantee that affiliates, ambassadors, and sales representatives receive their commissions regardless of the channel in which a sale is completed.  

This way, corporate sales channels complement the existing sales force rather than compete with them. 

S4DS has the technology you need to make sure your corporate channels don’t compete with the sales force but instead​​ empower the representatives to do better by adopting the technology you provide for them. 

Checkout experience options for different business models:

1. Give your end-customers the chance to select a representative during the checkout process

Many potential customers may want to buy your products but simply don’t know a representative they can go to. 

Having a corporate website where they can purchase directly is a great way to keep them and avoid losing the sale. However, this doesn’t mean that representatives should be completely left out. 

The checkout process on your corporate website should offer acknowledgment of the sales to a representative, and if the business decides, assign commissions for purchases made via this channel to them. S4DS enables your business to have this checkout process using business rules in a way that is transparent for the end-customer and representatives:  

• Option1:
  • When buying in corporate e-commerce, during the checkout process, you can enable a field where customers can select their representative from a list when completing the payment. 
• Option 2:
  • Have the commission for an e-commerce purchase be automatically assigned, completely or in part, to a representative by preconfiguring business rules whenever the customer does not specify a representative. In this case, you could segment the best-performing representatives in different geographic zones and spread the sales commission among them as an incentive to continue helping drive customers to the business with their Social Selling efforts.
• Option 3:
  • In the case of a point of sales, the employee in charge of processing the payment in-store can ask the client if he or she already has a sales representative that influenced their purchase, and then assign the commission accordingly in the system. 
• Option 4:
  • If the user doesn’t remember who his or her representative is, it can be useful to include a purchase assignment process in the back office. This way, corporate users can assign a commission for a sale when processing the order for dispatch. 

EXTRA TIP: Consider including the name and picture of your representatives in the checkout to help customers easily identify their own. 

Following these tips, the business guarantees transparency in the operations of every channel by making sure all commissions are correctly assigned to the representatives independently of the sales channel. 

2. Automatically assign commissions to representatives using tagged replicated e-commerce websites

Take the experience to a new level of personalization and empower your representatives with their own replicated website that they can forward to their customers and that automatically calculates their commissions when a purchase is made on their replicated e-commerce websites. 

Leverage the replicated websites by enabling them to connect to the representatives’ social media profiles, include their contact information, and personalize product recommendations while setting each representative’s unique brand. 

Powerful replicated websites, like the ones S4DS provides, enable your company to stay in control of the journey and results through the administrator’s back office, while any sale made in the e-commerce of the representatives will automatically generate a commission for them. 

A good replicated website will empower representatives with the tools to position themselves and their brand in a competitive market:

• Personalized wishlists and ready-to-buy shopping carts directly to their customers’ inboxes for payment. 
• Automatic checkout process assigned to their unique URL. 

3. Maximize the influencers’ and ambassadors’ efforts by tagging their sales on super-replicated websites 

Over 61% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations to make a buying decision. 

Fully customizable influencer websites are useful to guarantee the assignment of commissions for sales that are made in the context of a campaign with social sellers by enabling them to have their own super-replicated website that focuses on their power of influence to drive more conversions and how they connect to your product.  

Include one-of-a-kind banners and product recommendations that enhance the experience to drive more sales. Also, position the websites further via ambassador tags that are unique to the influencer and their audiences. 

The influencer website should offer a frictionless experience for the end-customer to journey from social media profiles to the checkout page as seamlessly as possible. Buying should feel natural, as though you are directly acquiring products from the influencer.

A good influencer website should automatically assign commissions to the content creator during checkout. Much like replicated websites do. 

S4DS offers the checkout experiences that your business model needs: 

S4DS’s one-stop solutions have the functionalities your business needs to provide seamless checkout experiences for your end-customers and representatives while maintaining a healthy balance between channels. 

1. Checkout experiences for buyers to select their representative with S4DS:

• Select the representative in a dropdown field in the corporate e-commerce
• Allow the assignment of a sales representative in stores 
• Include an option in chatbot interactions for customers to select their representative.

2. Automatic checkout for affiliates’  and influencers’ replicated websites

Each replicated or influencer website that the business activates with S4DS’s Software is unique and has an intelligent checkout process that is able to automatically tag any purchase to the representative whose site it was made from. 

3. Payment personalization and unique shopping carts to forward to customers

S4DS’s replicated and influencer websites allow representatives to personalize shopping carts for their customers and forward them via email or message for the end-customer to quickly complete a purchase. 

They can also add products to a wishlist and share it with their customers using customized messages and product recommendations according to their previous interactions.

4. Assign a representative in the corporate back office when it is not specified

In case a customer didn’t specify the seller or forgot who it was, a corporate user can log into the back office and manually alter orders to assign a representative for those purchases that do not have an assigned representative. This can be done according to business rules. 

This way, the business ensures that all sales made through any corporate channel still reflect on the network’s results. 

Experience the power of S4DS’s technology to revolutionize your checkout experience for multiple sales channels by scheduling your free guided demo with our team of experts today.

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