About the problem

Near a month ago I got an issue from a small family business owner and a last week I was able to do a research regarding it.

It is an offline shop which also has a website. The current issue is the entrepreneur could not delegate processing online orders to a separate person, therefore sometimes due operational overload online orders have not been processed on time.

At this moment the issue temporarily has been solved by disabling online orders.

We have to think about possible solution. Based on the market research, near 50% of customers do purchases online - online sales channel

*potentially*
could double business revenue.

Discovery

Get more information about the business

It was a small talk and I didn't get enough information necessary to going further. My next step was to check a source of code of their website to get any information about platform they use to run their shop.

The source code shown the shop is based on the Woocommerce.

How to make sure you would not lost orders which come from the website?

Assuming you are using smartphone which is always with you, it would be good to redirect online orders to yours or your employee's smartphone. My next steps were to check what kind of integration options the Woocommerce offers to its clients.

Options of 'Woocommerce - smartphone' integration

Woocommerce supports integration with instant-messaing app 'telegram'. Telegram has been chosen because of it popularity on the business's target market. According to my preliminary research, plugins support is available in Woocommerce premium account.

Notifications for telegram
https://wordpress.org/plugins/notification-for-telegram/

WP Telegram Plugins by Manzoor Wani

Telegram Bot
https://t.me/GuruWCTGBot

Woocommerce supports plugin for sending sms to customers and to the shop admin. In particular, it is possible to receive a notification about a new order. At this moment it costs 100 USD per year and works in integration with other plugins, which total price is topic for extra research. Knowing the annual orders based on past years and assuming the online sales channel *potentially* gives an increase in revenue by x1.5-x2 times, it is possible to esimate the return on investment in further work with this option.
https://woocommerce.com/document/sms-for-woocommerce/

Woocommerce also has an official mobile app and a variety of third party mobile apps. I haven't dive deeper into this direction, but it looks like there's also an option to get notifications on your phone for every new order.

Woocommerce official mobile app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.woocer.woocommerceapp

Woocer - Woocommerce admin
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.woocer.woocommerceapp

Order alert for Woocommerce
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monkeydata.orderalert.woocommerce

Summary

In case my initial assumptions were right - shop is based on the Woocommerce and the business owner or his employee actively uses smartphone - there are variety of options to return back the online sales channel without extra finance overhead of hiring a new employee.

The results has been shared with the business owner.

A few e-commerce related publications:

Case study: a new sales channel for pharmacy chains and farmers
Case study: flowers store chain growing revenue
Principles behind my work