Creating the overall look and feel of the store is what will bring your store to life and generate the product sales. The company store design is the first experience that an end user shopper is going to have when they hit the store. The overall branding and design is a really important component of the store, if not, the most important component.
When building your Company Store, keep in mind three major components that make up the storefront: the Design, the Product Categories, and the Products.
Design the Storefront
Your home page is prime real estate for selling your products, make sure you use appealing content to guide shoppers through the store. Incorporate a slideshow to your homepage to add movement and interaction right on the homepage. Use the slideshow feature to supplement the company’s branding, feature a specific message, or show off the products in the store. The theme designer gives you complete control of the customization of your store. You can change the fonts and the colors throughout the store. And with Drag and Drop Page Builders, you can customize the design even more! Add images, video, text, files
Branding Tips to Keep in Mind:
1) Match your client’s guidelines and direction
2) Use high-quality images for products, logos, and site graphics
3) Be consistent throughout the store
All themes are responsive, so they will resize and adjust automatically no matter what type of device is being used to access the store. Your store will look great on a phone or tablet as it does on a laptop or desktop. If you don’t have the time to build the store yourself, it is probably worth it to take advantage of our turnkey solution. One of our talented designers can design a fully customized store for you.
Create Categories
Categories are an extremely important element of your Company Store. Creating categories & sub-categories will help guide your shoppers to the products & help them find exactly what they need. You want to make it as easy as possible for shoppers to find their products and categories do just that.
Bright Sites offers some great category features for organizing your store. Offer as many categories as you’d like, set up your products so they appear in multiple categories – for instance: you can have a polo top that appears in both Featured Products and Marketing. Here are some other category examples you can use:
- Type of Product: Drinkware, Apparel, Hats, Golf, Bags, Pens
- Featured Products: Display your most popular selling products directly on the homepage.
- Product Brands or Logos: Nike, Callaway, Eddie Bauer….you get the idea.
- Corporate Divisions: Perhaps your client has various divisions within their corporation – it might make sense to separate the store products based on those divisions.
Add Products
After you’ve set up your categories, you can start adding your products! You can offer any product you’d like in your Company Store, there are absolutely no limitations. There are two ways to get products into your Company Store, you can either add them in manually or choose from our database of only exclusive suppliers.
We have a limited database of select supplier catalogs, if you want to offer any of these products, you can easily copy them into your store. From there, you can modify the products as you need.
Adding products on your own is a very popular way to go. We find that with Company Stores, your clients are going to want to offer very specific products, maybe they want to make sure that only a certain type of coffee mug has their logo, or they want to make sure their employees are wearing the same high-quality uniform – this is just a way for them to control their brand and their image. Adding products in Bright Sites is very easy, one thing we like to tell people is that it is just as easy, if not easier, to add products directly into your store than on an excel spreadsheet!
There are a few required fields that you will need to enter in order to have the product appear in the storefront, and the rest is up to you! You can set the prices to whatever you wish, add product descriptions, add product images, and organize the product options, such as various sizes & colors. You can offer product personalization options such as an embroidered name, or a department. You can even track live inventory and have this appear in the storefront.
Show the shoppers how their logo will look on their product with the Virtual Logo Capabilities. Support multi-brand corporations in one logo library location – offering a choice of logos to shoppers. Or, give your users the freedom to upload their own logo.
Keep Going!
There are so many features and functionalities you can take advantage of that will really bring life into your store. Various retail elements will give the shoppers a familiar experience when purchasing products in your store. Don’t forget to ask your client why and how they will be using the store. Once that foundation is set, you are ready to design the store, create categories, add products, and start selling!