Epos Now launches integrations with Facebook and Google to boost foot traffic with NearSt
Epos Now is delighted to partner with NearSt and offer our merchants brand new integrations into Facebook Shops and Google Local Product Listings.
NearSt helps businesses all around the country show their in-store inventory to keen local shoppers, live. It helps businesses create more exposure for their amazing products.
With an Epos Now integration, our merchants can showcase their products to millions of local shoppers with ease, integrating up to date inventory data with the web’s most frequented local shopping search engines and social networks.
How NearSt unlocks Facebook Shops and Google Local Products
Getting your products in front of the people who want them most can be tough, but NearSt helps you do just that.
NearSt seamlessly integrates into your Epos Now system and uploads inventory data to the most popular places where local shoppers are browsing for products, including:
- Google Search
- Google Maps
- Google My Business
- Facebook Shops
NearSt doesn’t just make promoting your wares easy - it makes updating that information easy too. NearSt uses data cleaning technology to improve inventory data accuracy and enrich product information automatically. Inventory data is then securely fed to sites and services where customers are looking for the products they need.
The power to draw
When you want to find something out, what do you do? If you’re like most people these days, you go to Google.
Google receives billions of search queries every day, on every topic you can imagine [1]. And when it comes to retail and shopping based queries, Google has a huge market share. Google makes up 36% of all product discovery searches and owns 76% of all retail ad search spend in the US [2]. For local retailers, it’s seen a quadrupling in “near me” searches over the past 12 months [3].
Sites like Facebook and Instagram are becoming more and more valuable to retailers every year, too. With over 1 billion users and 250 million people interacting with digital storefronts, Facebook Shops is rapidly becoming one of the main places where merchants are promoting their wares [4]. And 80% of Instagram’s 1 billion users use the platform to research products and services they intend to buy [5].
It’s never been more vital for retailers, restaurateurs, and sellers of all kinds to cultivate a digital presence.
The need for foot traffic
Foot traffic is the life of any store. Without customers coming through your door, you can’t move any of your products.
Existential threats to retailers from the pandemic have been exaggerated. Even in this time of ongoing epidemics, foot traffic in stores across the world has more or less returned to normal [6]. And with 80% of customers more likely to buy an item in-store than online, it’s vital that retailers do everything they can to get people into their store [7].
What you get with NearSt
NearSt helps you get people in your store by using a fully automated process that places your products on the web’s most popular shopping destinations.
Facebook Shops
Automatically create a store directly on your business’s Facebook page, showing a constantly updated view of everything you stock.
- Enable your customers to browse your wares directly on Facebook
- Use the default storefront, or customise your own collections and store design to make your Facebook Shop uniquely yours
- Tag posts and images with your products, making it even easier for your audience to shop with you
Google local product listings
Appear in all the places where locals could find your store and products in Google including:
- Google Maps: Make your business more likely to appear in Google Maps when people search for terms relevant to what you do or products that you stock.
- Google Image Search: When people search for images and inspiration near your store in Google, your products can show up, directing most customers to your door.
- Google Shopping: Capture shoppers browsing Google Shopping for products nearby and send them to your physical store, with powerful calls to action.
- Google My Business: Show a live searchable view of what you stock with See What’s In Store on your Google business listing.
- Google Voice Assistant: Help local shoppers using their Google Assistant see that you have the products they want.
Boost footfall with Google Local Inventory ads
For an optional daily advertising budget, NearSt can also automatically show your products at the top of Google to shoppers searching for them nearby and direct them to your store.
Display live availability
Give customers looking up your business in Google and Facebook the ability to see what you have in stock directly in search results, driving incremental footfall and sales.
- Complete POS integration: NearSt takes the inventory information automatically from your Epos Now POS, so you don’t have to.
- Automated product information: NearSt sources product information so that you don’t have to spend any time creating your own ads.
- Automatic integration monitoring: NearSt will continuously update your product and inventory information to give your potential customers the most relevant and up to date information.
A measurable impact
See how people nearby find your products and what they’re most interested in from a single, simple dashboard on NearSt.
- Local awareness and engagement: See what people are searching for nearby and what products they’re interested in and click on.
- Help with directions and calls: See the number of people who saw your products and clicked through to call or get directions to your store.
- Website visits: Measure the number of visitors who clicked to find more information from your website after seeing your products online.
- Estimated footfall: Using NearSt’s footfall algorithm, view an estimate of how many shoppers visited your store.
Real-time analytics
In addition to showing you how shoppers are engaging with your products locally, NearSt also provides you with unique local insights to inform your business strategy:
- Up to the minute product insights: See which of your products are being seen most often by shoppers near your store, and which are generating the most interest.
- Search insights: See the terms shoppers are using to search for products like yours, keeping you informed about what your customers really want.
- Popular trends in your industry: Every day NearSt captures over 2 billion data points on local shopping searches and behaviour. Data is aggregated and anonymised so you can see emerging popular products in your industry.
- Online to offline attribution: Accurately estimate in-store footfall and sales driven by local interactions online using NearSt’s proprietary online-to-offline technology, without the use of any sensitive customer data.
Get started today
Are you ready to boost your store’s foot traffic and sales? Then it’s time to get started with NearSt. Install via the Epos Now App Store in just a few minutes, and start showing your products to local customers on Google and Facebook.