High street and Main Streets have been living with prophecies of doom, gloom, and devastation for several years now as more and more trading and business takes place online, and the last-mile problem gets more and more effectively resolved by better and better solutions.
However, despite all this difficulty, the central business districts of all kinds of urban areas consistently remain vibrant and interesting communities with valuable services and profitable businesses. This is because clever and inventive people are finding new ways to give people what they want in towns that they can’t get from websites.
Wherever your village/town/city carries out most of its commerce, if you are thinking of striking out into a physical world business location and joining in with this kind of business project, there are a litany of questions, considerations, and issues that you will need to face. Moving from the very general to the specific high street, down to the precise, these ideas will be important to think about as you plan and arrange all manner of important business decisions.
General: Passing trade vs. Direct customers
Is your business going to find its customers more through passing trade or customers with a direct and specific need? To give examples of this, when was the last time you just walked past a locksmith and said, “yes, I think I do need to break into my own house.” Locksmiths are just one of a variety of businesses that people only go to when they have a specific need. These are the people that make their money mostly off direct customers. By contrast, a bookshop is something you browse through. A certain segment of a bookshop’s customers would be those who come in with a list of authors, titles, and specific requests, but this will be the considerable minority.
More and more businesses that rely on directed customers are finding themselves online, but people do still use locksmiths in the real world, as well as many other services, because of factors like customer service, expert in-person advice, and personable business experience. If you are confident, you can offer these to the level that can keep you afloat, push forward and go for it.
Specific: Footfall
Businesses that rely on passing trade only have hope if people pass by and make their way through the city/town/village this way. All kinds of different factors can affect footfall, from the more obvious and tangible, like the relative position of local parks, restaurants, and sports amenities, to the more distant and esoteric, such as the level of foliage in the area, trends of anti-social behavior, the average ambient noise level, and even in some cases the name of the street itself. Data like this can often be gathered from local councils and other similar services.
Publicly available information might be less up-to-date than some private companies that collect this sort of reportage, but it will still give you some idea. Failing all that, you can simply go to the people yourself. Ask friends/relatives who live in the area. Survey townsfolk. Just enjoy a day out there yourself. Try and get a feel for how the town moves its people. This can help you make the best decision when it comes to exactly where your business can go.
Precise: Immediate Outdoor Space
This depends significantly on what kind of business you will be setting up, but to one extent or another, it will be important. The immediate outdoor space around your business space, how much control you have over it, and what you can put in it will be vital to think about as you consider your shopfront’s style and your business’s future. Some of the questions will be simple and binary ones with definitive yes or no answers, such as “Will you be able to use commercial outdoor furniture?” and “Can you deploy advertising boards in the street as well as on the shop itself?” while others will be more generic and open-ended such as “How inviting is the outdoor space?” or “What can we offer to passers-by in the way of samplings?”.
These decisions will vary depending on what kind of shopping area you are occupying. Somewhere close to a roadway might have a lot of footfall and easy parking but much more limited options when it comes to immediate outdoor space. A shopping center could be great for passing trade business, but the expense might not be something you want to deal with if your clientele is more directed customers. However you approach this issue, there is still plenty of business opportunity on the high street. It just has to be seized in the right way.
