Creating a Digital Pop-Up Shop

We’ve probably all seen a brick and mortar pop-up shop. They rent a storefront for a short amount of time and everyone flocks to see the unique products they carry while they are still open. After a while, they close and you wait eagerly for the next pop-up shop to appear.

However, the concept also translates to ecommerce websites. A digital pop-up shop can help you grow your audience, find brand partners that yield results, and create buzz for your brand. These mini shops within your established shop can help you drive traffic and interest to the rest of your website by offering your customers something exciting and new.

What is a Digital Pop-Up Shop?

A digital pop-up shop is a mini shop that appears on an established ecommerce store. The pop-up shop appears as a collection of products that are only available for a short amount of time. These pop-up shops could showcase limited edition items, items from a particular best-selling brand, or items that are recommended/curated by an influencer or celebrity.

The purpose of a digital pop-up shop is to create a new experience within the framework of your existing store, so that your customers get to see your brand from a new angle. Newness, buzz-worthiness, and experiential should all be adjectives that describe your pop-up shop.

Benefits of a Digital Pop-Up Shop

New experiences

Your customers can get comfortable with your marketing and store design quickly. No sooner have you put out new content, than everyone’s seen it and is ready for something new. Digital pop-up shops are a great way to create a new experience, without constantly having to revamp your entire store.

For example, if you typically release new collections quarterly, then a pop-up shop could be a way to shake things up if you offer a pop-up shop in between your quarterly releases. These pop-up shops don’t need to match the scale of your quarterly releases, but they also create momentum in the middle of your other releases.

Creating Buzz

A pop-up shop is an easy way to create buzz on social media. Partner with influencers to announce the exclusive pop-up shop, or find media outlets to share their new experience with.

A pop-up shop can also have accompanying marketing that drives additional traffic to your site and gains the interest of your audience. For every pop-up, there could be emails, social posts, collaborations, reviews, and more to help you spread the word.

Creating Co-Branded Buzz

Who wants to pop-up by yourself? Finding a retail partner who can help you create co-branded marketing around your pop-up shop is the perfect way to share each other’s clout and build up each other’s audiences.

Your partner can help you create the products within your pop-up shop, or they can simply help to promote your pop-up shop through influencer posts, giveaways, and reviews. For example, if you want to create a collection with a famous graphic designer, you can share it in your pop-up shop, then the graphic designer can share on their social media and their website.

Targeted Marketing

Sometimes, it can be hard to target your audience when you offer a wide array of products. With a pop-up shop, you typically have a more well-defined set of products and can therefore be more precise in your marketing.

For example, if you sell women’s clothing, then you appeal to a wide array of audiences. If your pop-up shop features only dresses from a specific designer, then you can target that designer’s existing audience with your social ads and marketing. This also lowers the costs of your marketing, because you are better able to set the parameters for your targeted ads.

Feature These Items in a Digital Pop-Up Shop

Now that you’re sold on the idea, it’s time to build your pop-up shop! There are many approaches for finding products to feature in your pop-up shop, but here are a few options of items that you can feature in your shop-within-a-shop.

Limited Edition Collections

Limited edition collections not only create buzz, but they also create urgency. Adding low inventory alerts or letting people know how many are left is a great way to capitalize on the limited nature of the pop-up shop.

Short runs of new products can also help you gauge your audience’s interest in certain trends and inform your future product design.

Co-Branded Pop-Up Shops

Partnering with another brand for your pop-up shop affords you opportunities to co-marketing and co-promote your shop. You can either design a product line with this brand partner, or simply stock and carry the brand’s best-sellers in a dedicated space on your site. Both can help you create a brand partnership that works for everyone.

Working with another brand also shares their clout. You can work with brands whose audiences overlap with your target market so that you grow your audience and sell to new customers while you are working with this partner brand.

Be sure to define what each brand’s role is so that you both know what you are expected to do and accomplish over the length of your partnership. For starters, each partner should share the collection with their email list, social media audiences, and prominently on their website.

Celebrity/Influencer Curated Collections

Your website may already have a collection of staff picks. Take this a step further for your pop-up shop with celebrity and influencer collections. The celebrity or influencer can pick their favorite products from your shop and you can create pop-up shop that shares their branding, imagery, and reviews, as well as the collection that they recommend.

Again, this type of pop-up shop shares the clout of the influencer with your brand so that you can both grow your audiences while you are both promoting the pop-up shop. When the influencer recommends your products, they are also providing social proof to your audience, so that they feel confident in their purchase.

How to Set Up a Pop-Up Shop: Carro’s Brand Partnerships

Carro’s brand partnerships allows you to partner with top-selling Shopify stores to sell each other’s products. Through Carro, we seamlessly integrate stores so that you can partner together and list each other’s products in each other’s stores. You’ll each share the profits and each customer’s lifetime value when they purchase through our integration. When a sale happens, both brands get to keep the customer!

With Carro’s Brand Partnerships, retailers can add additional products and revenue to their store without any effort, and suppliers can sell their products on trusted brands’ sites. You can choose to be a retailer, supplier, or both.

Sell bikes but don’t sell helmets? Sell women’s clothing, but want to offer a line of menswear? Want to add jewelry to your product catalog? Now you can. Don’t let your customers go anywhere else. With brand partners, you can offer everything they need without having to purchase any inventory. You’ll sell the helmets on your site, your partner will ship the helmets automatically when a sale happens. You’ll increase your revenue without adding anything to your marketing costs or workload.

You can do this with 1 or 1 million stores, there’s no limit to the brands you can partner with. There’s also no upfront inventory costs or net terms. Expand into new product categories without the risk of carrying any inventory. There’s no cost to get started!

Try Carro's Brand Partnerships

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