Ever since Ricochet launched, we have been actively building new and efficient ways to run your store. Every single activity from adding new products, adding consignors, printing checks, ringing up customers, and measuring your performance takes time out of your day. Through dozens of product updates and redesigns, we’ve been actively learning from the community and looking for feedback on where things can be more efficient.
One of the most common problems we see is stores looking to get online and realizing it’s too difficult or complicated for them. All the while, the retail and consignment community is constantly reminding everyone how much opportunity there is in selling online.
The challenge to this is that the variance of web skills among store owners is so huge, that it’s hard to give a clear answer that suits most people’s needs. Some owners have the skills or resources to build an incredible website completely on their own, others need more help.
Ricochet has offered a web store system for a long time. With hundreds of customers actively using the platform to run online sales, it’s been a remarkable success. But while we have been actively pushing updates and features to the core Ricochet POS, the web store has been mostly unchanged for years.
This is all changing today.
Earlier this year, we published our 2020 goals and development timeline to give everyone a heads up of what we will be working on, and when you can expect new features to arrive. Well, with COVID-19, we had to rethink that quite a bit. In early March, we decided to completely shift and put all development and design efforts into a new web store. So today, we are unveiling that first big project.
The new Ricochet Web Store is now the fastest and easiest way to get your products showcased and for sale online.
As we were going through this build, we were very careful to think through the entire online experience, and redesigned it to be simple and more effective. Every single interaction has been intentionally designed to make managing your orders and online store easier than any other platform out there.
Order Management
Previously, the only way to see your online orders was to check in on the Web Sales Report within Ricochet. This is completely changed with an all-new online sales dashboard, uniquely designed and tailored to meet the needs of active stores online.
We’ve introduced order statuses. This will allow stores to organize and manage their online orders and quickly see what orders are new, shipped, fulfilled, or canceled. You can also get a quick snapshot of your overall system or dive deeper into an individual order to see its details. Within each order contains essential contents like the customer’s billing, shipping, contact info, and a broken-down view of the products sold so you can actively pull sold inventory from the sales floor.
Design & Styling
Building a stunning website is always super intimidating, especially if you don’t feel like you know where to start. And many stores want to get online, but don’t feel like they can afford to pay a designer to build it for them. We wanted to build a solution that would be incredibly easy for beginners to use and have enough customization for experts to create something unique and effective for their needs.
We started by creating a new section specifically for the design of your website. Here you can change everything from your primary colors, font styles, button styles, navigation, header, and footer. Each of these components enables you to build a store that more accurately suits your brand and design.
Additionally, with the new interface, stores are significantly more empowered to create changes on their own and test it out. Want to change the style of your website’s navigation, it’s quite literally just one click. Headers are easier to customize, slideshows are more understandable, and managing your fonts and colors is completely new.
Shipping
Get your products out of your store’s door and onto the steps of your customer is always more complicated than people expect. Similarly to how it has been done before with Ricochet, you can choose what shipping options you would like to offer to your customers, and then the shipping API will automatically calculate estimated shipping costs for you.
Additionally, you always the option to not ship anything from your store if you would like to sell items online but only for local pickup.
What’s new is a more user-friendly shipping interface. With simple toggles, you can choose to either offer flat-rate shipping or dynamically calculated rates.
Custom Page Building
We’ve completely overhauled the custom page builder to let stores create new and custom pages with significantly less effort! Now organized into an understandable interface, creating pages for your consignment terms, policies, contact info, hours, and much more is much more simple.
We’ve updated the actual page editor with pre-built modules to help you populate your page with meaningful content. With this change comes an improved interface for your SEO meta descriptions, page hierarchy, and other settings.
Support & Resources
One of our biggest goals for the web store is to empower every single user to feel confident in building a website on their own. We know that the internet can be complicated and difficult for people to understand.
As this launch matures, we are making huge efforts to build in-depth blogs, articles, and videos to show people how to do every single function they may need when building their website.
You’ll also see, scattered throughout the platform, help text and insights to guide you on best practices or tips for a specific function. For example, right beneath the designer when you are adding a logo, we give you a link to step-by-step instructions on how to format your logo correctly and what size it should be.
We are going to be actively improving our online support section and will update people regularly as it improves.
We are only getting started.
While we are super proud to launch the new web store and bring it to every Ricochet customer for only $39 per month, there is still a lot of work to do. Over the course of our development timeline, we are actively looking into dozens of advanced features that will continue to enhance and improve the platform.
As a team, we consider this update as a completely new product that will get its own dedicated support and attention. There is no other tool out there that can make such an impact on a store than a new website, and we want to make sure you all get the absolute best solution possible.
Getting online can be one of the most impactful decisions you will ever make for your business. Now might be the perfect time to get started.
Think about what kind of online presence you would like to have. How can you balance effort with online sales? Building and running a good online presence can be a lot of work, and not everybody feels that it is necessary. It’s up to you to decide what type of store you would like to run.
Generally, we organize stores into 3 separate needs for an online presence.
- Stores that just want their products listed online but don’t necessarily want to sell online. This is a fantastic way for stores to increase their audience and drive a bit more sales without a ton of daily work and website maintenance. Without selling online, stores can still post new products to social media, send email newsletters and grow an audience, but not have to deal with shipping, online orders, and the other work that comes into running a full-fledged website.
- Stores that want to sell online, but most of their efforts are going to be focused on the in-store experience. Probably the most common approach we see, there are tons of stores that want to showcase and sell their best items online, are happy to ship items and have the margin to do so while still getting a decent profit, and want to grow their brand through email marketing and social media efforts.
- Stores that are dedicated to online sales and are aggressively seeking a larger audience. We see this approach often for stores with multiple outlets or those that are prepping to open more. Once established, online brands are exceptionally easy to scale with your audience. You’ll sell products rapidly and establish an excellent online reputation as customers leave reviews, share with their friends, and tag you in online social space.
If you would like to discuss your online store with our team, we are more than happy to have a conversation and have an honest discourse about the best plan of action. We’ll help you plan everything you need from getting your product photography catalog complete, to how to pick a domain.
As always, visit ricoconsign.com for more information. Stay safe, and stay healthy!
