How to Open a Brick-and-Mortar Store in 2026

Why would anyone abandon the comfort of one-click checkout for fluorescent lights and a parking lot? Despite all the hype around two-hour delivery, brick-and-mortar businesses still account for 83.6% of the US retail market. 

In the third quarter of 2025, ecommerce grabbed 16.4% of sales, up 5.1% from the same quarter last year—but total retail grew too, rising 4.1%. Retail store openings in the US are also expected to rise about 4% in 2026.

In other words, digital is growing alongside physical stores, not replacing them.

Ahead, you’ll learn how to open a brick-and-mortar store, hear from real-world success stories, and look at the trends shaping the future of brick-and-mortar retail.

What is a brick-and-mortar business?

A brick-and-mortar business is a company that operates from a physical storefront: the kind you can walk into, browse around, and leave with a shopping bag in hand. Unlike retailers that exist online only, these businesses let you browse products and make purchases in person. 

The brick-and-mortar meaning traces back to the literal building materials—bricks and mortar—historically used to construct permanent structures. The term emerged during the rise of the internet to distinguish physical retailers from their new web-based competitors.

Whether that’s a 3,000-square-foot flagship store or a hole-in-the-wall sandwich counter with room for six stools—if there’s a door you can walk through, it’s brick-and-mortar. Most share these five traits:

• A permanent or semi-permanent location in a building 
• Face-to-face interactions between retail associates and customers 
• Immediate product fulfillment, with customers taking items home instead of waiting for shipping
• The ability for customers to touch, see, or try products before purchase 
• Regular, fixed overhead costs like rent, electricity, and property taxes 

But in 2026, that definition comes with layers. Retail stores have moved beyond browsing and ringing up sales. They’re now part of a larger retail ecosystem in which the same space might:

• Act as a fulfillment hub. Picking, packing, and shipping online orders to speed up delivery.
• Double as a showroom. Letting customers see and try products they’ll later buy from your website.
• Serve as a pickup point. For customers who want to skip shipping fees or get their order today.
• Host experiences. Workshops, product demos, pop-up shops, or community events that draw people in.

Today, a brick-and-mortar establishment isn’t the opposite of ecommerce, but an offline touchpoint in an omnichannel strategy. Your store becomes something customers can’t replicate through a screen: a personal connection, an opportunity for an impulse purchase, and the instant gratification of walking away with a new purchase.

How do brick-and-mortar stores work?

Brick-and-mortar stores sell products to customers who stop by and shop. An attractive storefront (maybe with window displays) draws in passersby. 

Once customers enter the store, they view, touch, and interact with products they’re considering buying. In the case of clothing stores, there’s an option to try on the item in the store’s fitting room.

Sales associates are often on hand to guide customers through that process. They’re able to greet customers, answer questions, and check the availability of stock. The end goal is to bring a customer to the checkout counter to complete their purchase, providing immediate customer access to the product so they can take it home right away.

Brick-and-mortar stores can also act as hubs for omnichannel retailers who offer experiences such as in-store events, buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS), or buy online, return in-store (BORIS).

Advantages and disadvantages of a physical store

Opening a physical store is a high-effort move that can give your brand credibility, visibility, and tactile value—if it’s done right. Here’s a clear-eyed look at what brick-and-mortar gets you, and what it demands in return.

Advantages

First, a look at the benefits of a brick-and-mortar retail business:

Reach customers who don’t shop online

Even in 2026, not everyone shops online. As of the start of last year, global internet use sat at about 67%. And even among those who shop online, plenty still prefer to buy in person—especially for products that need trying, testing, or sizing. Brick-and-mortar stores cater to customers who prefer these in-store experiences.

“Retail offers us a market that we wouldn’t access online,” says Esther Babayov, marketing director of The Suit Depot. “There are just certain demographics that prefer to shop in person—such as older customers, customers who are unsure of their size, customers who are looking for something super specific, etc.—and if we were only online we would be missing out on all of those opportunities to serve those customers.”

Deliver better customer experiences

No matter how good AI try-on technologies have become, you can’t smell a candle or test a mattress through a screen. In-store shopping gives people a multi-sensory experience, and it’s often the only way to build confidence in a high-consideration product.

Physical storefronts provide a wider range of sensory and social offerings, including tasting product samples, experiencing curated brand audio, and engaging in in-person social interactions with staff and other shoppers.

Brands like lampshade retailer Candid Owl, which opened a physical location after strong online growth, found that customers wanted to feel the fabrics and visualize products in their homes. 

“We opened our first brick-and-mortar store last year,” says Candice Small, founder of Candid Owl. “Whilst successfully selling our product online, we were increasingly receiving requests from our customers to open a showroom/retail unit to enable them to visit and experience our products in person. Our customers can now touch, feel, and experience our fabrics in person to select their bespoke lampshades with confidence that they will suit their home décor.”

Blend online and offline for more flexibility

As of 2025, 97.2 million Americans regularly use BOPIS, accounting for 34.2% of all US consumers. That’s one in three shoppers who expect to browse from their couch and pick up down the street. If you’re only selling online, you’re missing out on customers who may not want to wait for shipping or trust doorstep delivery. 

One way to combine online and in-person shopping is known as “click and mortar” or phygital retail. In this case, people order the item through an online retailer and head to their physical store to collect the item. 

Earl of East is one retailer that used click and mortar to keep its physical store open during the pandemic. Customers downloaded a mobile app to order their food and drinks, and the store was open during the day for collection.

Trust and brand loyalty

Physical stores build trust in a way that online-only brands cannot match. Associates can interact with shoppers face-to-face and provide personalized clienteling experiences that instill confidence in a purchase. That human connection creates a level of understanding that a screen doesn’t allow. 

A 2025 study from The Harris Poll and Quad found that 65% of US shoppers say they trust retailers more when shopping in physical stores than online. They can see the quality of products, guarantee that a deal is real, and skip buyer’s remorse. 

This has a direct impact on brick-and-mortar stores. It leads to higher customer lifetime value, reduces return rates, and strengthens customer loyalty. 

Local market advantage

A brick-and-mortar store also targets local customers because they are close to where people live and shop. A 2025 peer-reviewed study found that more nearby shops within half a mile from home increase the likelihood of walking for certain in-person shopping trips. 

If your store is in a high-visibility location, you can pull in plenty of foot traffic and become a trusted part of the community. 

Disadvantages

A physical retail presence comes with trade-offs:

Inventory management is more complicated

Running a store means keeping physical stock—and getting that wrong costs money. Retailers have to manage limited inventory due to physical space constraints, so they can’t keep as much stock on hand as, for example, an ecommerce warehouse. 

The margin of error is small. Overstocking means storage issues and markdowns, while understocking means lost sales. In 2025, US retailers saw nearly $850 billion in returned merchandise, according to the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns.

High operating costs 

Online businesses often can get away with a laptop and a supply chain. But with physical stores, you have to account for rent, salaries, point-of-sale (POS) systems, utilities, insurance, signage, security, cleaning, and maintenance—and that’s just month one. Critically, these are fixed costs you must cover, regardless of sales performance. 

While retail rents are up just 1.8% year-over-year nationally, many major metros are seeing much higher growth, and wages for retail workers now average almost $17 per hour, with rates higher in major cities.

Competition

Your physical store is competing with the shop down the street, with Amazon, with TikTok shops, and with ecommerce-only brands with zero physical overhead and nationwide reach.

Walmart and Target have made BOPIS standard. Sephora’s store design has become the template for experience-first beauty retail. And digitally native brands like Allbirds and Glossier are now playing the brick-and-mortar game, too.

That means you can’t win on price or scale: You’ve got to win on curation, service, speed, and specificity.

Limited reach

Brick-and-mortar businesses can become staples in their community, but their reach is naturally limited by their geography. Without an online presence, you can only serve customers who are able to visit your store in-person. It’s also less convenient for shoppers, because they have to travel to your store and shop only during operating hours. 

Running both an online and physical store used to mean managing two different businesses, but platforms like Shopify have turned them into a single, unified retail operation. 

You can manage all your inventory in one place, track shoppers’ history across channels, and integrate retail strategies like BOPIS and ship-from-store without changing your daily workflow. Shopify’s POS solution makes this possible and has been shown to provide an average annual sales uplift of 8.9% for unified retailers.

Brick-and-mortar vs. ecommerce: Key differences

Brick-and-mortar retail has been around for centuries, and what keeps it relevant is immediacy, sensory experience, and real human interaction. Customers can see, touch, try, and take their purchase home instantly.

Ecommerce, on the other hand, offers convenience and scale. You can buy a pair of shoes at 2 a.m. from your couch and have them delivered to your door the next day. That flexibility is part of why global ecommerce sales are projected to hit $7.3 trillion in 2027. 

The most successful retailers today, however, lead with an omnichannel strategy that integrates physical and digital storefronts, capturing the advantages of both. 

Both models have strengths and inevitable shortcomings. Here’s how they compare at a glance:

Types of brick-and-mortar stores

Not all brick-and-mortar stores serve the same purpose—or cater to the same shoppers. Some are built for browsing, some for bulk buys, and others for quick, in-and-out essentials.

Here are the major formats that continue to anchor physical retail.

Traditional retail categories

Start with the classics: department stores, specialty shops, grocery chains, and corner-store staples.

Department stores

Saks, Macy’s, and Nordstrom are all examples of department stores. Large-scale retail environments like these act as anchor stores, and house a variety of product categories from apparel and cosmetics to home goods. They are organized into different sections and sell many brands under one roof. 

As cities grow, so does the opportunity for retail. By 2031, department stores will account for $2.51 trillion of global economic output. Retailers who want a slice of that pie need to be where the people are—and increasingly, that means investing in dense, walkable locations with curated assortments and connected experiences.

Specialty stores

Brick-and-mortar businesses like Home Depot, CVS, and Petco all specialize in one product category—whether it’s home improvement items, cosmetics, or pet care products. In most cases, shoppers visit specialty stores with an item already in mind. 

Despite pressure from big-box retailers and tariffs, small specialty retailers are growing. Revenue is expected to rise at a 4.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), reaching $68.8 billion by the end of 2026.

Specialty stores are leaning into location strategy: the US Southeast now has the highest concentration of specialty retail locations, thanks to its population density.

Grocery stores

Grocery stores are the staple of brick-and-mortar retail. They provide essential goods that bring shoppers back through their doors on a recurring basis. 

Brands like Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and Costco have physical stores in most states—and most regions have their own grocery brands, such as Piggly Wiggly (US South and Midwest) and Stop & Shop (Northeastern US). In-store grocery shoppers spent an average of 23.4 minutes per visit in 2024, down only slightly from previous years.

Convenience stores

Convenience stores are small retail businesses that are typically open long hours and found in easily accessible locations. They carry a range of everyday items like groceries, snack foods, confectionery, toiletries, soft drinks, tobacco products, and newspapers, often at slightly higher prices due to their convenience. The convenience stores market grew from $2.28 trillion in 2024 to $2.39 trillion in 2025.

Emerging and popular store concepts

Here are four innovative store models that are lighting up real-world retail today.

Experience-led retail spaces

Experience-first retail brings together tactile moments, tech-enhanced demos, and that little feeling of “Wow, I didn’t expect that.”

Take Heathrow Airport. In August 2025, it launched a campaign called Redefine Your Beauty across all four terminals. It built dedicated Beauty Bars offering live master classes, fragrance engraving, and skin analysis stations. In Terminal 5, travelers could relax with free La Mer facials and Molton Brown massages before boarding.

Gaming lounges

Hobby retail is having a real-world revival. The appeal is simple: people want to play inside a shopping experience. Gaming lounges deliver recurring footfall, social buzz, and high-margin add-ons.

Game Nite in Memphis is a great example. This lounge is the brainchild of the team behind a local adventure museum and escape rooms. Inside, you’ll find 10 themed rooms designed like cozy living spaces. Game sessions run from 45 minutes to three-and-a-half hours, and prices range from $27.99 to $54.99 per person.

Niche cafés

Coffee shops are increasingly finding ways to differentiate themselves from competitors. In a city full of flat whites and minimalist menus, sometimes the smartest move is to go all in on character. Literally.

Enter Australia’s first Hello Kitty Café, inside Melbourne Central. It’s split into four themed spaces, each celebrating Hello Kitty and her friends: Cinnamoroll, Kuromi, My Melody, and the icon herself.

Examples of successful brick-and-mortar businesses

Forget the old-school mall model. Today’s most successful physical stores blend smart tech, bold storytelling, and a customer experience you can’t scroll past.

Wildling

Wildling is a German shoe retailer that opened its first brick-and-mortar showroom last year. It uses Shopify POS, which fully integrates with its ecommerce platform, to show real-time stock availability, manage inventory, and track orders. 

Since launching its first showroom with this setup, Wildling has seen 50% more first-time shoppers in their physical showrooms.

Beauty Heroes

Beauty Heroes was a successful ecommerce retailer that wanted to open its first brick-and-mortar store. It combined the two channels—online and offline—using a single POS system. 

The launch of its first brick-and-mortar store was a success. The Beauty Heroes team saved hours reconciling customer information across both channels—instead using that valuable data to retarget and analyze.

Burberry

Luxury retailer Burberry opened its first “social retail” store in Shenzhen, China, in 2020. But unlike most retailers, it didn’t open the store with the vision of selling more merchandise. 

Instead, it prioritized delivering immersive retail experiences for their customers.

Burberry’s WeChat mini-program incentivizes customers to share their experiences on social media in return for social currency that can be redeemed for exclusive content. This gives the brick-and-mortar store an online presence, too. 

Peak Design

Peak Design started with one idea: make camera gear easier to carry. Today, the brand sells globally through its Shopify-powered site, retail stores in New York, San Francisco, and Japan, and a growing network of wholesale partners.

In stores, Peak Design’s team offers guided, hands-on help. But at first, with a fixed checkout setup, that service hit a wall—staff had to dart back and forth between shoppers and registers, creating bottlenecks and friction.

Since implementing Shopify’s handheld devices, staff can now:

• Look up inventory on the spot
• Check customers out from anywhere
• Keep the experience smooth, efficient, and entirely mobile

Framebridge

Since launching in 2014, Framebridge has redefined custom framing with a sleek online sales experience. But once it set its sights on rapid retail expansion, it needed a platform that could keep up.

For nearly a decade, Framebridge ran on a homegrown, open-source platform. But that meant more time patching tech—and less time building the seamless experience it wanted.

After replatforming to Shopify, Framebridge now runs more than 30 retail stores and manages over 250 employees—all from one system, all built to provide a great customer experience. And it’s seen the numbers to back it up:

• 15.3% increase in add-to-cart rate
• 8.1% increase in checkout-started rate
• 7.5% increase in conversion rate

Jenni Kayne

Jenni Kayne built her namesake brand into a California lifestyle empire—starting with clothing and footwear, then expanding into home furnishings (Jenni Kayne Home) and skin care (Oak Essentials).

From the beginning, the brand prioritized omnichannel connection. But as new product lines and store openings accelerated, it became clear it needed a platform that could scale with it.

Since migrating to Shopify Plus and Shopify POS, Jenni Kayne has:

• More than doubled its brick-and-mortar retail footprint
• Unified customer profiles across channels to drive deeper engagement
• Removed friction for staff when checking inventory across stores and ecommerce
• Streamlined quote creation for Trade Program partners with branded imagery and product details

“Shopify has helped us fulfill our omnichannel vision and provide a customer experience that is smooth and seamless,” says Sam Mella, director of home experience for Jenni Kayne.

Mejuri

Mejuri was built to break the old rules of luxury, making fine jewelry accessible for everyday wear. What began as a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand now spans 45 stores across four countries, blending online reach with tactile, in-person experiences like piercings and styling sessions.

But with growth came friction. A custom tech stack slowed Mejuri’s ability to move fast and innovate. So they switched to Shopify’s unified commerce platform. Since replatforming, Mejuri has:

• Migrated both ecommerce and POS in under nine months
• Slashed tech overhead and maintenance costs
• Transformed stores into fulfillment hubs with dynamic order routing
• Accelerated global expansion, starting with their Sydney store

How to open your first brick-and-mortar store

Walk through six steps you can take to open your first brick-and-mortar business:

1. Find the right location
2. Choose a point-of-sale (POS) system
3. Hire and train retail associates
4. Manage inventory
5. Experiment with pop-up shops
6. Merge in-store shopping with ecommerce

1. Find the right location

Where you open matters just as much as what you sell. The right brick-and-mortar location puts your brand in front of the right people—people who are already shopping, browsing, and spending.

When finding a good retail space, consider:

• Where your target customers spend time
• Foot traffic patterns and peak hours
• Proximity to competitors
• Ease of access and parking
• Visibility from the street

Take footwear retailer Rothy’s, for example. The brand has more than 30 brick-and-mortar stores across the US, plus five international locations, and is expanding further in 2026. CEO Stephen Hawthornthwaite explains the brand chose cities with a healthy blend of both existing and potential new customers.

“From there, we look for a neighborhood that’s full of character, walkable, and offers a mix of retail, restaurants, and cultural activities,” he says. 

If you’re a Shopify retailer, use tools like Shopify POS Analytics and Shopify Audiences to help identify where your most engaged customers already are. You can also filter your reports by location to decide where to expand next based on regional buying behavior.

📚Read: 7 Retail Locations to Consider for Your Store

2. Choose a point-of-sale (POS) system

Your POS is your store’s brain. With Shopify POS, you get a system that syncs seamlessly with your online store, tracks every sale across all locations, and gives your staff access to customer profiles, purchase history, and product availability—right from the register.

Shopify is built to keep your inventory, orders, and customer data in sync across every channel: storefront, online, warehouse, and pop-ups.

• Unified channels. Manage your full inventory from one dashboard no matter where the sale happens.
• Multiple locations. Stock levels update in real time with every sale, return, exchange, or transfer.
• Real-time visibility. Sell seamlessly across channels with a system that talks to itself. 

Shopify’s total cost of ownership (TCO) is up to 36% lower than competing platforms. That includes software, hardware, payments, support, and everything in between.

Plus, with Shopify Tap to Pay, a handheld mobile POS works on your phone—perfect for sidewalk sales, in-aisle checkout, or popups with no tech headaches.

Whether you’re opening your first store or adding a second (or third), Shopify POS gives you one system to run them all.

3. Hire and train retail associates

Your store’s vibe depends on the people running it. Your team should know your products, your brand voice, and how to offer support that doesn’t feel pushy.

Shopify makes employee training easier with staff permissions in POS, so employees can access what they need—inventory, customer info, sales tools—without messing with back-end settings. Shopify POS also lets you assign each sale—or individual items within a sale—to a specific staff member, either from the cart or directly from the smart grid. If you offer commissions or want to track sales performance, you can use the built-in Retail sales by staff attributed to sales report.

Pet supply retailer Tomlinson’s struggled with a clunky POS that slowed checkouts and made staff training a headache. After switching to Shopify POS, it cut training time by 32%—speeding up onboarding and streamlining store operations.

“There was no downtime when we made the switch to Shopify POS,” says Kate Knecht, owner and operator. “We were able to train in a sandbox environment for a month and a half prior to the launch to allow our team to get used to the system.”

📚Learn: How To Hire Employees: 8 Step Guide for Retailers

4. Manage inventory

The biggest mistake first-time store owners make is not syncing their inventory across channels. 

Shopify makes it easy to stay on top of inventory: 

• Track stock levels, get alerts before products run out, and see the reason for inventory changes—all from your Inventory dashboard. 
• Need to restock or adjust levels? Do it in just a few clicks. 
• You can also dig into inventory reports to spot trends and avoid stockouts before they happen.

💡 Pro tip: Use ship-to-customer fulfillment to turn your store into an endless aisle. If an item’s out of stock at one location, don’t lose the sale—sell it in-store and ship it from your warehouse or another store that has inventory. It’s convenient for the customer, and you get to keep the revenue.

Footwear brand Allbirds uses this exact feature to close sales for out-of-stock items. It lets them maintain high store conversion rates across more than 35 locations—without overloading every store with full inventory.

5. Experiment with pop-up shops

A pop-up shop with a clear end date creates urgency that feels real. It taps into FOMO—the fear of missing out—a feeling that drives 60% of millennial purchases. When customers know your pop-up won’t be there next week, they’re far more likely to walk in and make a purchase.

If you’re using pop-ups to test temporary locations, Shopify gives you the tools to launch fast and sell like a full-time store:

• Multiple location support. Track inventory and performance by pop-up location, separate from your main store or online channel.
• Unified customer profiles. Every pop-up sale is linked to a customer profile, so you can follow up with email marketing, offers, or personalized service later.
• Staff permissions. Add temporary staff with limited access for the duration of the event, without giving them full admin access.

Eyeglass brand Warby Parker started as an online retailer, then tested a physical presence with a pop-up in a bus. The result was a wildly successful retail experiment. Today, they operate more than 323 storefronts—and counting.

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6. Merge in-store shopping with ecommerce

A customer might scroll your Instagram on their phone, check a product’s availability on your site, visit your store to try it on, and then place an order from their laptop later that night. 

Throughout this journey, your retail store is a powerful marketing asset that builds brand awareness and drives traffic across all your channels. That’s why unified commerce is your competitive edge. 

With Shopify, you can offer:

• Local pickup and delivery. Offer flexible fulfillment options from the same dashboard. Let shoppers choose local pickup at checkout or get their order delivered from the store closest to them.
• Returns and exchanges at any location. With Shopify POS and your Shopify admin, your staff can handle returns and exchanges across all locations, regardless of where the item was bought.
• Gift cards and loyalty rewards that work across all channels. Gift cards bought online can be used in-store. Loyalty rewards earned in person can be redeemed online. Shopify keeps it all in sync.

Customers don’t care which system you use—they just want everything to work.