Protect Your Business With Retail Store Insurance
From the minute you open your retail store in the morning until you lock your doors at night, you face the risk of lawsuits, property damage, theft, and other costly incidents. Issues can also occur when employees are preparing to open your store or doing cleaning and other post-closing tasks. In fact, incidents like claims of infringement in your advertisements can occur anytime. That’s why you need retail store insurance.
Do the risks you face mean you should spend your days and nights worrying about property damage or injuries? Absolutely not! You can’t ensure that issues will never occur, but you can take steps to protect your retail business from the financial consequences of unforeseen events. Assessing your business risks and purchasing retail store insurance to cover them can help you stay focused on your work during the day and sleep better at night.
What Does Retail Store Insurance Cost?
Before addressing which policies you need, let’s talk about retail store insurance costs. You may be surprised to learn how affordable retail insurance can be. Often, you can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in coverage for just a few hundred dollars annually.
Various features about your business (including size, claims history, and others) are considered in your premium, but the bottom line is that you can enjoy tremendous coverage and powerful peace of mind affordably.
As for specific figures, you can get instant, self-service retail store insurance quotes from biBerk online whenever it’s convenient. Whether you buy necessary coverage right then or sleep on what you’ve learned and return later, you’ll know what your investment in business insurance will cost.
What Retail Shop Insurance Does My Store Need? Consider These 6 Policies.
Most store owners and decision-makers understand the risks of their operations. However, they’re often stretched thin by countless tasks and obligations and, consequently, don’t get a chance to consider how critical it is to get financial protection from those risks.
Once they do have a chance to ponder their store’s exposures and start thinking about how to protect the business, their question tends to be, “What types of retail business do we need?” The good news is that reaching the point of making that critical inquiry means you are literally minutes away from getting reassuring financial protection. That’s how long it takes to purchase an insurance policy online from biBerk.
Turning back to the question about necessary policies—the answer is that it varies. Details about your retail operations (such as what you sell and where you’re located) affect which types of insurance you need. The six policies most commonly required by retail stores are:
- Workers’ compensation insurance. States typically require this insurance for any business with employees. It provides benefits if your team members are injured, get sick, or die due to an incident on the job. It can help pay for medical costs, legal fees, and lost wages and provide a death benefit to the employee’s family. For instance, imagine an employee suffers a laceration that requires stitches when using a box cutter. Workers’ comp insurance can cover the cost of their care and time away from work.
- General liability insurance. This policy covers damages and legal costs related to injury claims from non-employees (customers, for example), medical expenses associated with these incidents, and damage to others’ property in your possession. Landlords typically require this type of coverage. Customer injuries are a good example of how it can protect your business. Let’s say a shopper slips on the wet floor in your store, suffers a concussion, is transported by ambulance to the hospital, and sues your business for the cost of their medical care. Your general liability policy may pay for those expenses and your legal defense costs.
- Business owners policy (BOP). Also called a property & liability policy, a BOP conveniently combines general liability insurance with company property coverage. It can protect a building you own, the space you lease, and other property you own, lease, or have in your care, custody, or control. This includes inventory losses from theft. It also covers business interruption and lost income resulting from property damage, as well as costs you incur to resume business operations after suffering property damage, such as using a temporary location. For example, if a fire damages your breakroom, your BOP may cover the cost of repairs.
- Commercial auto insurance. Some stores own or lease vehicles for making deliveries. This policy covers liability resulting from accidents caused by people driving those vehicles. For instance, if your employee fails to brake in time and collides with another vehicle at a traffic signal, your commercial auto policy can protect the business from a lawsuit filed by the other driver and pay for repairs to your vehicle. A policy can provide payment for an incident even if you use the vehicle for personal activities outside of its primary business use.
- Cyber insurance. Unfortunately, it seems hackers never rest. This insurance helps cover costs related to incidents where someone steals sensitive information and uses it to commit fraud or is likely to. The policy can pay for expenses related to the breach, like notifying customers and providing credit monitoring.
- Umbrella insurance. This type of insurance can cover overages when a claim exceeds the limit of another biBerk liability policy—up to the umbrella policy’s limit. It keeps you from having to pay the amount that your liability policy won’t cover.
Get Insurance for Your Retail Store That’s Active as Soon as Tomorrow
Incidents can affect your retail business at any time. To protect yourself from them, you should buy the retail store insurance policies you need as soon as possible. Nobody wants to incur a significant expense that would have been covered by insurance if they had bought it!
We make it easy to understand the policies we offer and make purchases on our website, with coverage active as soon as the next day in most cases. Our retail customers tell us it's a huge relief to know their retail insurance policies are in effect and that biBerk will support them should the unexpected happen.
If you have questions about retail business insurance coverages or costs, our licensed insurance experts are happy to answer them. Don’t hesitate to reach out for support.