I have walked into many shops at closing time, usually to talk about one thing: moving from brick and mortar to online. Often the owner is counting the register, the lights over the back shelves are already off, and before I even sit down someone says, “We know we need to be online. We just don’t know where to start, and we don’t want to blow the budget figuring it out.”

That sentence covers most of my job as a retail ecommerce consultant. In truth, the move from brick and mortar to online is rarely a technology problem. Instead, it is a business problem that happens to involve technology. Retailers who treat it as “build a website and wait” tend to lose money. By contrast, those who treat it as opening a second location, with its own staffing, stock, marketing and customer service, usually do well. If you want the general setup steps first, our guide on how to start an online store covers them.

So this article covers what I tell clients in the first few meetings: the numbers, the decisions that matter, the mistakes I keep seeing, and a realistic plan for the first ninety days.

Why the Shift From Brick and Mortar to Online Matters Right Now

First, some context, because many store owners either overstate or understate how much buying has moved online.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data tracked on FRED from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, ecommerce made up 17.1 percent of total U.S. retail sales on a seasonally adjusted basis in the second quarter of 2026, up from 16.3 percent a year earlier. Industry coverage of the same report also noted that online sales grew 12.2 percent year over year, while total retail grew 6.7 percent over the same period.

Read that carefully. More than four out of five retail dollars are still spent offline, so physical retail is clearly not dying. However, the online slice is growing nearly twice as fast as retail overall, and it takes share every quarter, one of the clearest ecommerce trends of 2026. In other words, if your store is flat, part of the reason may be that some of your growth is going to whoever shows up when your customers search on their phones at 10 p.m.

Brick and Mortar Shoppers Already Shop Online

For a store owner, an even more useful number comes from a Harvard Business Review study of more than 46,000 shoppers. The researchers found that only 7 percent of shoppers were online only and 20 percent were store only, while 73 percent used multiple channels during their shopping journey. Moreover, those multichannel customers spent an average of 4 percent more per in store visit and 10 percent more online than single channel customers. On top of that, they made 23 percent more repeat trips to the retailer’s stores within six months.

That is why I rarely describe this work as “moving” in the sense of leaving. For most independent retailers, the goal is not to close the store. Rather, the goal is to stop being invisible to the 73 percent who browse online before they decide where to spend. Seen that way, the jump from brick and mortar to online is about reach, not replacement, and it is the first step toward a full omnichannel retail strategy.

Start Your Brick and Mortar to Online Plan With an Honest Inventory

Before anyone talks about platforms, I ask for three things: the last twelve months of sales by product, a list of the top fifty customers if the owner tracks them, and a walk through the stockroom.

Together, these tell me most of what I need. Here are the patterns I look for.

Products that travel well. For example, a boutique selling handmade candles has an easy online story, since the items are light, durable, giftable and photogenic. On the other hand, a furniture store with heavy, bulky items has a harder road, because shipping cost and damage risk will shape everything. Neither situation is a dealbreaker, but each leads to a very different plan.

Items that only you carry. Suppose 60 percent of your revenue comes from brands that Amazon and big box stores sell cheaper with free shipping. In that case, online is a price race you will probably lose. If, however, you carry local makers, exclusive lines, or curated bundles, you have something to compete with, and the online catalog should lead with those.

Hidden Costs of Taking a Brick and Mortar Store Online

Customers you already know. Many owners underestimate this. After all, a shop with ten years of regulars already has a launch audience. In fact, the first online sales almost always come from people who know you, not strangers from Google.

Your real margins. Selling online adds costs that never appear on a store P&L: payment processing on every order, packaging, shipping you may subsidize, returns, and the time it takes to pick and pack. Consequently, a product with a 25 percent margin in store can lose money once those costs are added. Personally, I would rather a client learn that on a spreadsheet than on a bank statement.

Picking a Platform for Your Brick and Mortar to Online Move

This is where owners often get pulled into long debates. Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Square Online, Wix, and the rest all work, as our roundup of the best ecommerce platforms for small business shows. In practice, choosing a “wrong” platform is less dangerous than choosing one that does not connect cleanly to your point of sale.

My questions usually come down to four.

Does it sync with your POS? If your register and your website do not share one inventory count, you will oversell. Picture someone buying the last blue sweater online at 9 p.m., even though a walk in customer bought it at 4 p.m. Naturally, you will spend the next morning apologizing. For that reason, shared inventory is the single most important technical requirement.

Who maintains it? A hosted platform handles security updates, hosting, and uptime for you. Meanwhile, a self hosted option like WooCommerce gives more control, although someone has to own the updates, backups, and ecommerce hosting. If that “someone” is the owner’s nephew who leaves for college in August, choose hosted. Our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison walks through that trade off in detail.

Cost and Flexibility

What does it cost at your real volume? Compare monthly fees, transaction fees, and the apps you will need. Keep in mind that a cheap starter plan gets expensive once you add reviews, subscriptions, and shipping tools.

Can you leave? Make sure you can export products, customers, and order history. Platforms change pricing over time, so you want the option to move.

Overall, for most small and midsize retailers I work with, a hosted platform paired with their existing POS (or a POS made by the same company) is the sensible default. Admittedly, it is not the most exciting answer. Still, it avoids most of the headaches I get called in to fix.

Clean Inventory Data Before Moving Brick and Mortar to Online

Inventory data is the least glamorous part of the project, yet it determines whether launch day goes well.

Most stores have messy product data. Items are often entered as “BLU SWTR M” in the register, some SKUs are duplicated, and seasonal items were never removed. On top of that, counts drift because shrinkage was never logged. In a store, staff work around these issues because they can see the shelf. Online, however, the data is the shelf.

Therefore, before launch, budget real time for the following:

1. First, cleaning product names into something a human would search for
2. Next, grouping variants such as sizes and colors under one product instead of a dozen separate listings
3. Then, doing a full physical count and correcting the system
4. Also, deciding which products go online at launch, since you do not need everything on day one
5. Finally, setting a buffer for fast sellers so the site shows out of stock slightly before the shelf is empty

Keeping those counts accurate after launch is an ongoing job, which our guide to ecommerce inventory management covers.

A Smaller Launch Catalog Often Wins

One gift shop owner I worked with launched with only her 120 best sellers instead of 1,400 items. At first, she was nervous it would look thin. As it turned out, it looked curated, and because her counts on those 120 were accurate, she had almost no oversell problems in the first few months. Later, she added the rest in batches once the process was running smoothly.

Turning Your Brick and Mortar Sales Floor Into Online Product Pages

In a store, your staff does the selling. They answer questions, hand the customer the fabric, and suggest a matching item. Online, by contrast, the product page does all of that alone, which is why product page SEO matters from day one.

Good product pages for a store moving from brick and mortar to online usually have four things.

Real photos. Include several angles, consistent lighting, and something for scale. Fortunately, you do not need a studio, because a window with indirect light, a white sheet, and a modern phone get you most of the way there. Manufacturer stock photos are fine as a supplement. Even so, your own photos make you look like a real shop rather than a reseller.

Descriptions that sound like your best salesperson. I often ask a client’s top employee to describe five products out loud while I record it. Almost always, that transcript is better than anything a manufacturer supplies, because it answers the questions customers actually ask. Does it run small? Is it heavy? What does it pair with?

Availability and Social Proof

Clear availability and delivery details. Is it in stock? Can I pick it up today? When will it arrive if shipped? Ideally, shoppers should not need to reach checkout to find out.

Reviews, once you have them. Ask your regulars. In my experience, many will happily leave a review for a shop they like if you ask in person.

Checkout Lessons for Brick and Mortar to Online Retailers

The Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research puts the documented average at 70.19 percent, calculated across 49 different studies. Granted, some of that cannot be fixed, since many people are just browsing. Nevertheless, Baymard also estimates that an average large ecommerce site can gain a 35.26 percent increase in conversion rate through better checkout design, a topic our ecommerce checkout optimization guide explores further.

For a retailer moving from brick and mortar to online, the fixes are usually simple.

Show the full cost early. Surprise shipping fees at the last step are one of the most common reasons people leave. So if you charge shipping, say so on the product page or in a banner. Likewise, when you offer free shipping above a certain order value, mention that everywhere.

Allow guest checkout. Forcing someone to create an account before buying their first item is like making a walk in customer fill out a form at the register.

Payments, Mobile Testing, and Recovery

Offer the payment methods your customers already use. These include cards, digital wallets, and in many markets local options like bank transfers or e wallets. To find out which ones matter, ask your store staff what customers request. Their answer is usually more accurate than an industry survey. Then confirm your ecommerce payment gateway supports them.

Test it on a phone. After all, most of your traffic will be mobile, as our guide to mobile commerce explains. Go through your own checkout on a phone, on cellular data, with one thumb. Whatever annoys you will annoy your customers too.

Send an abandoned cart email. Most platforms let you do this with a few clicks. As a result, it is one of the highest return actions you can take in the first month.

Using Your Store as a Warehouse: Brick and Mortar to Online Fulfillment

Your store is your biggest advantage, yet most owners do not use it.

You already have stock sitting close to your customers. For this reason, buy online, pick up in store (often called BOPIS or click and collect) is the natural first fulfillment option. It costs almost nothing to start, avoids shipping costs, and brings people through the door. In fact, research compiled by Invesp found that 75 percent of shoppers who had used BOPIS said they were likely to make an additional purchase, and 49 percent had made unplanned purchases while picking up their items.

With that in mind, I usually suggest launching with three options:

• Store pickup for anyone local
• Local delivery within a set radius, if you have someone who can drive orders a couple of times a week
• Standard shipping for everyone else

Keeping Shipping Costs Under Control

Shipping, meanwhile, is where small retailers bleed money without noticing. To avoid that, weigh and measure your top products, and get real rates from at least two carriers. After that, decide whether you will charge actual rates, flat rates, or free shipping above a threshold. Finally, design packaging that protects the product without filling every order with bulky boxes you pay to ship.

Also, assign a time and a person for fulfillment. “Whoever is free” means nobody. One common setup that works well: online orders are picked and packed at a fixed time each day, before opening or during the slowest hour, by one named staff member with a backup. Our guide to the order fulfillment process breaks down each step.

Local Search: The Easiest Brick and Mortar to Online Win

Many owners assume that going online means competing nationally. In my experience, though, the fastest wins come from showing up locally.

Your Google Business Profile is the first place to start. To begin with, make sure hours, phone, address, photos, and categories are correct, and keep them current through holidays. Beyond the basics, Google also lets retailers show what they have in stock. As Shopify explains in its guide to local inventory ads, Google’s “See what’s in store” feature lets you list store inventory for free in your business’s Knowledge Panel, and it appears on both Google Search and Google Maps. Additionally, the same guide reports that local inventory ads led to 108 percent more shop visits.

Showing Your Shelves on Google

Search Engine Land’s coverage of Google Business Profile products is worth reading as well. Specifically, it explains how retailers can add in store products to their profile, which suits boutiques and makers’ shops.

Today, many POS systems connect directly to Google, so your in store stock can feed your listing automatically. If yours does, turn it on, because it is one of the cheapest ways to turn “near me” searches into foot traffic and online orders.

Bringing Your Brick and Mortar Regulars Online

Your regulars are the best launch plan for any brick and mortar to online transition. Here is what works.

Collect emails at the register, starting now. Ideally, do this months before the site goes live. A paper sign up sheet is fine, and while a small incentive helps, many regulars sign up just because they like you.

Tell them in person. Put a card in every bag, and have staff mention the site at checkout. In addition, place a sign at the counter showing what can be ordered online and how pickup works.

Give them a reason to try it. For example, a first order discount, early access to new arrivals, or online only bundles all work well. Once they’re buying, simple ecommerce personalization, like reorder reminders and early access for regulars, keeps them coming back.

Sell gift cards online right away. Gift cards are often the easiest first online product. Shopify has pointed out that digital gift cards are one of the fastest ways for a brick and mortar business to start selling online and secure immediate cash flow. Better still, there is no shipping, no inventory sync, and no returns to manage.

Brick and Mortar to Online Marketing That Does Not Burn Cash

The most common mistake I see is spending heavily on ads before the site is ready to convert. If your product pages are weak and checkout is clunky, ads simply pay to show people a store they will leave.

Instead, follow a sensible order of operations:

1. First, get the existing audience to the site through your email list, social followers, and in store signage.
2. Second, fix what you learn from those first orders and the analytics.
3. Third, build search visibility with local listings, clear category pages, and product descriptions that match how people search. Our ecommerce SEO guide covers the basics.
4. Only then, test paid ads with a small budget, measured against actual orders rather than clicks.

Email will likely remain your most profitable channel for a long time. For instance, a simple monthly newsletter featuring new arrivals, a staff pick, and something happening in store keeps you in mind without feeling like spam.

Social media, similarly, works best when it shows the parts of a physical shop that big online retailers cannot copy: the people, the new deliveries, the window display, the local event. That’s because shoppers who follow a neighborhood shop are following the shop, not just the products.

Staffing a Brick and Mortar to Online Transition

Here is something that rarely appears in vendor brochures: going from brick and mortar to online changes jobs, and staff will react to that.

Some employees worry that the website will replace them. Others, meanwhile, are excited but have no time for the new work on top of a full shift. Both reactions are reasonable.

Fortunately, a few things help.

Give the online store a clear owner. Even in a small shop, one person needs to be responsible for orders, product updates, and customer emails. If that person is the owner, then block time for it the way you would for a buying trip.

Credit store staff for online sales they influence. When a customer browses in store and buys later online, or vice versa, the staff member who helped them should not lose out. Otherwise, commission and incentive structures that only count register sales create resentment fast.

Train everyone on the basics. Every employee should know how to look up an online order, process a pickup, and handle a return of something bought online. After all, when the person at the counter says “I don’t know how that works,” the customer loses trust in both channels.

Mistakes I See in Brick and Mortar to Online Projects

After many of these projects, the same problems keep coming up.

Launching everything at once. Picture a full catalog, three marketplaces, a loyalty program, and paid ads all in the same month. Predictably, nothing gets done well. So start narrow and add over time.

Treating the website as a one time project. A site launched and left alone slowly decays. Over time, prices drift, photos get stale, and out of stock items stay listed. For that reason, plan for weekly maintenance.

Returns, Pricing, and Numbers

Ignoring returns. Write a clear return policy before launch. In particular, decide whether online orders can be returned in store; ideally they should be, since that is a big advantage over online only competitors.

Copying big retailers’ pricing. Simply put, you cannot win on price against companies with national logistics. Instead, compete on curation, expertise, speed of local pickup, and service.

Not looking at the numbers. Set up analytics on day one and check a few metrics weekly: visitors, conversion rate, average order value, and where orders come from. Honestly, nobody needs a dashboard full of charts. What you need is four numbers and the habit of looking at them.

A Realistic 90 Day Brick and Mortar to Online Roadmap

Here is roughly how I lay out the first three months for a small to midsize retailer making the move from brick and mortar to online.

Foundation Work in the First 30 Days

• First, review sales data and choose the launch catalog
• Next, choose a platform that syncs with your POS
• Then clean product data and do a full inventory count
• Also, claim and complete your Google Business Profile
• Meanwhile, start collecting customer emails in store

Building the Store From Day 31 to Day 60

• Photograph launch products and write descriptions
• After that, set up payments, taxes, shipping rates, and store pickup
• In addition, write shipping, return, and privacy policies
• Test the full checkout on mobile and desktop
• Train staff on online order handling once checkout works
• Finally, launch gift cards online as a soft opening

Launch and Learn in the Final Stretch

• Announce the site to email subscribers and in store customers
• At the same time, turn on abandoned cart emails
• Connect local inventory to Google if your POS supports it
• Each week, review the numbers and fix the biggest friction point
• Later, add more products in batches

In short, ninety days is enough to have a working, profitable online channel for most independent retailers. Of course, it is not enough to be “done.” Nobody ever is.

Final Thoughts on Moving Brick and Mortar to Online

When owners come to me worried about going online, they often think they are starting from zero. In reality, that is never true. Every one of them has products people already buy, customers who already trust them, staff who already know what sells, and a physical location that online only brands would love to have.

Ultimately, the move from brick and mortar to online is about taking those advantages and making them visible to people who start their shopping on a screen. So do it in stages, keep your inventory honest, make checkout painless, and let your store do the work it is already good at. Above all, remember that the retailers who succeed are rarely the ones with the flashiest websites. Instead, they treat online as part of the same business, run with the same care as the shop floor.

Frequently Asked Questions About Going From Brick and Mortar to Online

Do I have to close my brick and mortar store to sell online?

No. In fact, most successful independent retailers run both. Research summarized by Harvard Business Review found that shoppers who use multiple channels spend more and visit stores more often than single channel shoppers.

How much of retail spending actually happens online?

Census Bureau data published on FRED puts ecommerce at roughly 17 percent of total U.S. retail sales in mid 2026. Moreover, that share keeps climbing over time.

What is the most important technical requirement when moving from brick and mortar to online?

Above everything else, you need a single shared inventory between your point of sale and your website. Without it, you will oversell and disappoint customers in both channels.

Why do so many online shoppers leave without buying?

The Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate around 70 percent. Fortunately, hidden costs, forced account creation, and complicated checkouts are common causes you can fix.

Is buy online, pick up in store worth offering for brick and mortar retailers moving online?

Yes, especially at the start, because it avoids shipping costs and brings customers into your shop. Furthermore, Invesp’s BOPIS research found that many pickup shoppers make additional purchases while in the store.

How can local shoppers see my brick and mortar stock online?

Google offers a free “See what’s in store” feature along with local inventory listings. Both are explained in Shopify’s guide to Google local inventory ads and Search Engine Land’s coverage of Google Business Profile products.

References

1. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (data from the U.S. Census Bureau). Ecommerce Retail Sales as a Percent of Total Sales (ECOMPCTSA). FRED Economic Data.
2. Sopadjieva, E., Dholakia, U. M., and Benjamin, B. A Study of 46,000 Shoppers Shows That Omnichannel Retailing Works. Harvard Business Review.
3. U.S. Census Bureau. Quarterly Retail Ecommerce Sales Report. Census.gov.
4. Baymard Institute. Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics
5. Prosper Show. Ecommerce Grows 12.2% Year Over Year, Claims 17.1% of Retail Sales. August 2026.
6. Invesp. Buy Online Pick Up In Store Statistics and Trends
7. Shopify. Google Local Inventory Ads: How to Drive Foot Traffic
8. Search Engine Land. Google Business Profile Guidelines Updated to Include Products
9. Fit Small Business. BOPIS Statistics
10. Shopify Partners. How to Help Brick and Mortar Clients Move Online