New service brings shoppers to an FFL's own storefront through search, email, loyalty and marketplace listings, with results reported monthly against the store's own numbers; arrives ahead of Orchid's next generation eCommerce platform
Orchid, the firearms industry's leading provider of FFL technology, compliance and 2A friendly payment processing, today announced the launch of its Firearm Digital Marketing service, focused on growth and offered exclusively to retailers selling online with Orchid eCommerce. The service is built around three outcomes a gun store owner can see on a monthly statement: more shoppers finding the store, more of those shoppers completing checkout, and more of them coming back to buy again.
Retail FFLs face a problem no other retail category has. Google Ads, Meta and TikTok prohibit advertising for firearms and ammunition, which means the paid advertising most marketing agencies sell cannot be bought by a gun store at any price. Most dealers have been left to run their websites themselves, between counter sales, 4473s, distributor feeds and A&D records, with no practical way to grow online.
Leading the service is Erik Sherman, Orchid's Director of Growth and Product Strategy. Sherman joins Orchid from a digital marketing agency where he led content management platforms, Google Analytics and Tag Manager architecture including GA4 migrations, technical SEO programs, conversion rate optimization, HubSpot marketing automation, and executive reporting in Tableau, Power BI and Looker. He has structured Orchid's offering specifically for the retail FFL that cannot advertise on the major platforms and does not have staff to spare for its website.
"Many gun store owners do not have the hours to be their own marketing department, and the agencies that would do it for them sell advertising a gun store cannot buy," said Sherman. "We already run the store they sell on. Now the same team brings shoppers to it, gets more of them through checkout, and brings them back, and every month the owner sees what moved, measured against their own numbers."
Orchid's Firearm Digital Marketing service works the channels that remain open to a licensed dealer. In plain terms, that means four things.
Getting Found
Writing and tuning the store's product pages, category pages and blog content so that when a shopper in the store's area searches for a specific make and model, the store's own page shows up rather than a big box competitor's. This is what the industry calls search engine optimization (SEO), and for a gun store it also includes the Google Business Profile that controls how the shop appears on the map.
Getting the Sale
Reviewing pricing and shipping, cleaning up navigation and menus, and sending automatic reminders to shoppers who put a firearm in the cart and walked away, which happens to roughly seven out of every ten online carts.
Bringing Buyers Back
Building the store's own email list, sending back in stock and new arrival notices, and running loyalty levels and promotions for repeat customers. By retailers' own estimate, nearly a third of first-time gun buyers have since bought another firearm, according to NSSF's 2024 Firearm Retailer Survey.
Expanding Reach
Listing inventory on Guns.com, GunBroker and GunMade using the store's own marketplace accounts so the dealer, not Orchid, owns the customer and the sale.
Every engagement starts with measurement. Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager are installed on the storefront before any work begins, so the store has a baseline. On the last day of every month the owner receives one report showing traffic, conversion rate, repeat buyers and email list growth against that baseline.
The service is offered only to stores on Orchid eCommerce because the work happens inside the storefront itself, in the catalog, the pages and the offers, rather than in a slide deck of recommendations handed to the owner to implement. There is no outside agency to hire, brief or coordinate with the software vendor, and a named person at Orchid reviews everything before it goes live.
The launch comes ahead of the release of Orchid's next generation eCommerce platform later this fall. Where most gun store website solutions are assembled from a general purpose eCommerce package plus a chain of third party plugins for distributor inventory, FFL transfer routing, age verification, compliant payment processing and bound book integration, each with its own vendor, invoice and point of failure, the new Orchid platform is being built as a single system purpose built for the firearms retailer. Distributor catalogs, drop ship fulfillment, FFL locator and transfer handling, 2A friendly payments through Orchid Pay, and direct connection to Orchid POS and eBound compliance records will run natively in one place. Firearm Digital Marketing customers will be among the first stores moved onto the new platform.
Plans start at $250 a month for a Starter tier and scales depending on the FFL's size and growth objectives. Details are at www.orchidadvisors.com/firearm-digital-marketing or by email at digitalmarketing@joinorchid.com.
About Orchid: For nearly 15 years, Orchid has been the firearms industry's leading provider of FFL technology, compliance, and education solutions, serving more than 11,000 FFL users. Trusted by the largest names in shooting sports, Orchid powers the systems through which nearly 25 million firearm transactions are processed each year, with more than 60% of all U.S.-manufactured firearms flowing through its flagship Orchid eBound™ platform. The company is the only provider offering a fully integrated suite of FFL Bound Book, electronic 4473, native 4473 electronic storage, POS, eCommerce, 2A-friendly payment processing, and in-house compliance services, backed by a 100% Attorney Compliance Guarantee (terms apply). Together with its legal affiliate, FFL Law, Orchid delivers the industry's most complete ecosystem of software, payments, and regulatory expertise, helping clients run efficient, profitable, and ATF-compliant operations.