Opening a physical store boosts online sales in the surrounding trade area by an average of 6.9 percent in the weeks following the brick-and-mortar location’s debut, a new study from ICSC found. The report is the third in a series dubbed “The Halo Effect, Where the Halo Shines,” whose goal was to quantify the impact that opening a store has on online sales
The benefits are even more pronounced for emerging, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, for which the correlating halo effect for online sales is 13.9 percent when opening a new store. Conversely, closing stores has an even greater negative impact on retailer performance, resulting in an 11.5 percent drop in sales.
“ICSC’s data has always shown that consumers prefer shopping in-store over other channels,” said ICSC President and CEO Tom McGee. “While our earlier research on the halo effect demonstrated how physical stores drive web traffic and brand awareness, our latest report dives deeper by analyzing actual spend data. The findings quantify just how important brick-and-mortar is to today’s omnichannel consumers and underscore what retail experts already knew: The core of the omnichannel experience is the retail store.”
The research for the latest study included analyzing in-store and online sales of 69 retailers and 2103 individual stores.
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