To survive in the coming years, brick-and-mortar retail managers will have to adapt to the coming sea change of ecommerce and mobile shopping.
According to comSCORE, ecommerce product categories showed robust (10% or higher) growth in second quarter 2012. Shop.org expects online sales in 2013 to grow another nine to 12 percent. And web retailers saw growth of 28 percent in 2012 over 2011.
That’s not to say that the in-store experience will soon be history. Consumers still like to “touch and try” products they’ve read about and lean toward. In fact, more than 40 percent of consumers indicated they’ve “showroomed,” or evaluated products in the store before buying them online. So the "connect" from in-store checkouts to online shopping carts is alive and well.
Adapting to this new breed of customer means retail managers will have to step up to keep up. Sales associates will have to be better trained to ensure customers have a positive in-store experience. To enhance that experience, retailers will have to provide better, more creative ways for customers to interact with products. The goal is to dovetail online and offline strategies to ensure the sale.
Retailers need to take a lesson from traditional retailers like Nordstrom Rack. It uses mobile registers to quickly close sales. Multichannel retailers are fully exploiting dashboard-like technologies to unite online and offline data. In a single glance, these forward-thinking retailers can now see fulfillment, stock, online purchases vs. in-store returns, point-of-sale purchases compared to online cart abandonment.
E-commerce is growing at different rates on computers, tablets, and smartphones. Sales made from tablets are taking off. According to Oracle research, consumers make a purchase on a tablet nearly twice as often as on a smartphone. Another report from Shop.org reveled that retailers on average enjoyed a 129 percent rise in year-over-year sales (2011 – 2012) from smartphones and a whopping 178 percent buoy from tablets. The message to retailers: time to invest in your mobile user experience, with an emphasis on tablets over smartphones.
"The form factor has everything to do with it," explains Sucharita Mulpuru, vice president and principal analyst for online and multichannel retail at Forrester Research. She notes that smartphones require more keystrokes and take longer to load a page than on a tablet. "When you look at the sites that do really well on mobile, like Amazon or eBay, and some of the flash sale sites, like a Gilt Groupe, or a daily deal site, like Groupon, it's because they are one-click transactions," explains Mulpuru. "People are often transacting off of the app. Their payment and their log-in information is stored, which makes it easy and seamless."
Unless they want to be left behind, retailers will have to keep up with today’s increasingly mobile consumer, making it easier for them to shop and elevating the in-store shopping experience.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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