Today’s retailers must leverage their store fleets to make their companies more valuable to investors and their products more compelling to consumers. That means ramping up aspects of physical stores from front-end consumer experience to back-end functionality. At ICSC’s RECon Digital, experts detailed six ways stores can boost their brands’ bottom lines.

Drive sales

​Headlines these days often focus on the perceived woes of physical retail, so it’s worth noting that the most successful retailers operate stores. The year 2020 was a forced case study in the importance of stores as sales drivers, said Brookfield Properties senior director of business intelligence and strategy Anna Baskin. In-store sales still drove 76 percent of U.S. sales volume for the year, she said. Additionally, she said, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that in-store sales minus food, gas and auto dropped $44 billion from March 2020 to April 2020. Nonstore sales rose only $7 billion in that month. “Digital is not a substitute for physical," she said. "They work together and complement each other.” Shopping in stores is more sustainable and profitable and provides more customer satisfaction, said Coresight Research founder and CEO Deborah Weinswig. “It’s important to encourage consumers to buy in-store to cut down on returns,” she said. “During the pandemic, 50 percent of items returned were apparel. Dresses have a 90 percent return rate online.”

Convert browsers into buyers

Stores provide a deeper customer experience than websites, Baskin said. “There’s a large wasteland of abandoned carts that we’ve seen online during the pandemic. That’s really painful if you have those high acquisition costs to get customers to your site and then they don’t convert.” Customers love to come in to stores to have a tangible experience with a product, Baskin said. “What we’re seeing in the data is: A physical store is a great way to drive a substantive experience that’s going to drive conversion. In the physical world, customers are primed to buy, and online, they’re primed to browse.”

Cultivate loyalty via omnichannel offerings

Retailers can use stores to offer special perks to loyalty program members, Baskin said. They could enable VIP customers to shop from home via a virtual link to a sales associate in the store, for example, or hold livestream shopping events in which shoppers place orders online and keep watching to win prizes. “It’s not just connecting through discounts; it’s connecting through shared values,” she said.

Use stores as distribution centers

A retailer with physical stores has an automatic advantage over pure play e-commerce brands when it comes to last-mile delivery. National chains like to do deals with Brookfield Properties, Baskin said, because its footprint of 200 shopping centers can reach 99 percent of U.S. households within a two-day shipping range. Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target also have trumpeted the cost savings of using their store networks as fulfillment hubs for online orders. Now, post-pandemic, curbside pickup and same-day delivery make stores even more important distribution locations. Shopping center locations that are more warehouse friendly or accessible may even be more appealing to retailers, Baskin said.

Use stores as pickup locations for online orders

Allowing customers to buy online and pick up in store or at the curb benefits retailers and customers, Baskin said. “The customer gets immediate gratification, but stores are able to leverage in-store inventory and talent to do it in a cost-effective way. We’re seeing a large intent to continue to use BOPIS and curbside.” It’s all about the retailer’s mission, she said: Sometimes you want an immersive experience, and sometimes you just want to do curbside because you have the kids with you.

Use stores as return centers

​Retailers and customers recognize that returns are a huge waste of fossil fuels and cardboard, Baskin said. Retailers can cut down on wasted merchandise and get consumers to return merchandise earlier for a better chance of resale by encouraging them to bring the items to nearby stores, Baskin said.

Registered attendees of ICSC’s RECon Digital can watch recordings of panel sessions here.