As the leading next-generation team store platform worldwide, we regularly hear how difficult it is to organize, design, and sell custom team apparel and promotional items and grow a business simultaneously.
Let's start the article off by answering the question, "How can a team store benefit my business?" with some actual data from our merchants.
Setting up a team store has allowed our merchants to:
With the hours saved and revenue generated, more time, money, and effort can be put back into growing a business.
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How setting up a team store can save you time
How a team store can enable better communication
Ease of management through automation
How team stores can boost revenue
Team stores are also known as microsites, sub-sites, club shops, and group stores.
If you imagine your main site as the trunk of a tree, team stores or microsites can be considered the branches that grow out from it. In this way, team stores and microsites act as sub-sites that allow you to drive brand awareness and conversion in a more targeted way. You can read more about the definition of a team store here.
Unlike other team store providers, Brikl's team stores have been designed to allow merchants, coaches, designers, and sales reps the unique ability to set up a store in under 15 minutes. This process can conventionally take hours over days.
Once set up, you have the option to customize your branding, adding colors, logos, and banners to make your store stand out to your target customers.
What's more, Brikl's team stores have a unique duplication feature that allows you to clone a store to create an entirely new one, with selected products and collections also carrying over.
The time saved during this process is also considerable and can equate to almost 50-60 hours a week.
Eliminating order forms, manual input, design iterations, chasing payment, merchandising, lengthy store setup times, and inventory management is huge for custom and promotional businesses.
It takes us around 6 hours a day to organize team orders, no joke! We create spreadsheets to record data, such as sizes, customization, prices, etc., which a colleague then double-checks. Add to this the hours spent communicating with suppliers, team members, designers... organizing one custom order is hundreds of hours lost! - Brikl merchant.
All of the time saved here can be reinvested into growing, strategizing, and managing your business in more meaningful ways.
When you're liaising with internal and external departments, teams, and critical individuals during the design, production, and selling process, you can naturally expect some breakdown in communication.
But our research shows that this usually occurs when teams work in silos across spreadsheets and email.
This lack of real-time collaboration can affect everything, from knowing how much of one item you have in stock to the amount of time it takes to have one custom design signed off.
That's the challenge Brikl's customer communication panel is now solving for its merchants.
Orders and live inventories are broken down in real-time to provide complete transparency on revenue generated and stock levels. Designers and customers can collaborate on designs through shared links to move feedback from lengthy email chains into an easy-to-read comment box.
And by giving the whole company access, reports generated on the platform can act as a single source of truth for everyone, cross-functionally.
It's no stretch to say that setting up and running a custom or promotional business can be exhausting work!
That's why our Brikl team, with their industry-specific insights, is so valuable to the setup and selling process. They support and guide merchants from the first day on the platform onwards.
Brikl is so specialized in custom and promotional businesses that lightening the load of its merchants and delivering streamlined operations is a given.
Forget having to type and paste information manually. Your customers can pull one or hundreds of products with one click, including all variants and all descriptions. This ensures you can be ready to sell and customize in seconds.
The level of automation provided across the platform is second to none. This helps explain why in a recent poll given to our merchants, over 80% now sees Brikl as business-critical.
Brikl's multilingual and multi-currency features create a localized experience for your customers: this is incredibly important when encouraging customer loyalty (providing an experience they'll keep coming back for).
In fact, 70% of US consumers abandon their cart at checkout. Allowing customers to pay in local currencies can reduce this number by up to 50%.
Setting discounts and fundraising options also give customers the opportunity to take advantage of sales prices or donate directly to the store's chosen charities or causes.
The value of discounts to your customer is obvious - everyone loves a bargain! And with so many consumers shopping around for a good deal, giving your customers a discount also allows you to have a competitive advantage.
But your customers also love the option of donating to good causes. According to Cone Cause Evolution Study:
The rapid, simple, and relevant customer experience team stores provide can increase cart value and loyalty - no customer likes to be overwhelmed by choice or get lost in a sprawling site.
What's more, all orders are only placed when the cycle is complete, which gives you the benefit of larger quantity pricing when it comes to suppliers and manufacturers.
Curious to see what a few of Brikl's merchants are doing with their stores? Check out the links below.
Still asking the question, 'how can a team store benefit my business?'. Get in contact to have a Brikl expert walk you through many more of the benefits whenever you're ready.