Company Store Discovery: Key Questions to Ask your Customers

Opening a Company Store for your customer is an exciting decision. While our stores are very user-friendly to build, there are still some crucial questions you’ll want to discuss with your customer before you get started. Keep reading to learn more about the important questions to consider when building your Company Store.

Who, what, and why?

Who will be shopping in the store? Will shoppers primarily be employees, sports teams, or the general public? This can impact what type of permissions and integrations you may need to enable.

Next, what is the purpose of the store? Does your customer have a specific program in mind? If so, the type of store they need may vary, which is why it’s a great idea to speak with them before you begin the store building process.

Last in this category, why do they want a store? This is the part where it is absolutely vital to let your customer talk openly. A good open-ended question will give you more information about what they need in their company store.

Timeframe, Budget, Look & Feel

Maybe one of the most imperative conversations you need to have is regarding the time frame. So what is your customer’s timeframe? For example, when does the store need to launch and how long does it need to be open? This is recommended to ensure the store is built with ample time to fulfill and ship orders. In addition, discovering if it will be a temporary store or open indefinitely is very helpful to get a gauge on.

Next we have another very essential piece of information. What is the budget? How much is your customer going to invest in the store? How will you charge for the work you will do to build their store?

After determining these factors, you can move onto the look and feel of the store. What is the look they have envisioned? And will the store need to have full branding or is it going to be lightly branded?

User Experience 

We all want our customers to have a great shopping experience. That’s why we’ve made our solutions so modern and clean. So what kind of user experience will the shoppers have?

How do you want users to move throughout the store?

Do shoppers need to have individual user accounts? For example, Is it necessary for shoppers to keep track of orders, account balances, and addresses?

Does the store need permissions? Maybe certain groups of shoppers need to be limited from areas such as:

• Storefront & Admin Access 
• Categories & Products 
• Logos 
• Payment Methods
• Addresses 
• Shipping Methods 
• Coupons 
• Custom Data Collections

Lastly, let’s talk about manager approval. Do managers need to approve any orders? If it’s necessary for a manager to either approve or deny purchases, we can make that happen.

Payments, Taxes, and Shipping

How will shoppers “pay” for the products and will they need multiple payment methods? We offer the convenience of multiple payment methods for all your shoppers such as:

• Account Balances
• Gift Certificates
• Coupon Codes
• Points

So what about sales tax? It’s necessary to think about how you are going to properly account for sales tax. Our options include:

• Custom Tax Rates
• Zip code-based Sales Tax
• Avalara Integration

Next, does the shopper need to be charged for shipping? We have the latest state-of-the-art options in regards to shipping, like:

• Weight-based shipping
• Flat rate shipping
• USPS, UPS, FedEx 
• ShipStation 

Products

What products and categories will be used in your customer’s store? It’s smart to pick the products together with your customer and determine the categories they should go in.

What about logos, artwork, and personalization? Determine how your customer wants to decorate the products.

Make sure you have enough inventory in stock. Do you need the ability to track inventory? You have the option to track store level inventory or live supplier inventory. If you’re interested in live supplier inventory, check out our full page of participating suppliers here.

Integrations

Integrations allow your store to connect seamlessly to outside programs to increase efficiencies by automating processes. We have a myriad of integrations for all of your customers’ needs. A few of those innovative integrations include:

• Payment Gateways
• Sales Tax
• Shipping
• Direct Supplier
• Shopworks
• Zapier
• SSO
• Punchout
• API

Setting a foundation is the first step and also one of the most important aspects of building any online store, so having an idea of questions to ask your customer can be super helpful.

If you’re ready to get started on your own store, contact us today.