Killer Winter?

In the early twenty-first Century, sales of physical stores and e-commerce websites were flying with each passing day.

In the US, for example, from 1999 to 2007, the total volume of retail outlets in the country rose from 2 trillion and 870 billion to $4 trillion, while e-commerce sales doubled.

However, the recession has brought many challenges to retailers: the total consumption of consumers has been flat or declining, and the rate of return on investment has also been hit hard.

During this period, the once powerful category killer (highly concentrated in the same category of retailers) also showed a marked decline.

Best buy, the largest electronics retailer in the United States, has not been spared. Although the Fortune 500 company has been investing heavily in the market since 2007, its sales growth in 2008 has not even outperformed CPI in the US, and sales of computers and televisions have become more and more sluggish. The rate of return on investment has dropped from 23.68% to 15.01% since 2007.

In fact, before the recession, the return on investment in physical stores has been dragged down by the expansion of stores.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the average store area in the United States has risen from 18.45 square meters per person in 1999 to 23.06 square meters in 2009.

As a result, some savvy entity killer campaigns are in the field of electronic commerce, or take the strategy of combining Internet with Internet.

However, with the rapid rise of e-commerce giants, the situation of category killer shops and small and medium-sized comprehensive online stores is also in jeopardy.

Whether online or offline, the most attractive consumers of giant shopping malls or e-commerce websites are low prices and varieties.

They can not only lower the purchase price, but also take measures to increase inventory turnover, reduce investment in real assets, accelerate cash flow, and finally give consumers a delicious bait with huge discount.

In the US, Amazon plans to save more than 20% of the purchase cost for consumers, which will undoubtedly result in a discount.

Compared with department stores, the advantages of "giant" storage and pportation are more obvious. In many sales areas, consumers have accepted the new shopping habits such as online shopping.

The most obvious example of this is in the book market.

This year, famous chain bookstores such as wind and pine trees and photosynthesis have been shut down.

This is certainly related to the prevalence of "shallow reading" in China, but the rise of e-commerce giants and electronic reading is obviously the nemesis of physical bookstores.

Nevertheless, it is not a dead end in front of category killer.

If a category killer can solve two major problems, he can still get a share of the giant's hand, and even have a chance to grow up quickly, and he will gain a firm foothold in the business world and even shake those big rivals.

The two big problems are: what needs of consumers can't be met by comprehensive shopping malls or e-commerce websites? What kind of unique shopping experience should consumers provide?

Also in the field of book sales, while bookstores in mainland China are becoming increasingly crowded, Taiwan chain bookstores are constantly refreshing their records. In 2010, only 9 billion 800 million of Taiwan's bookstore sales volume increased to 11%.

At the same time, Taiwan's online bookstores, independent bookstores and chain bookstores are not plunged into a war of life and death.

The reason is that Taiwan's chain bookstores have their own unique and irreplaceable abilities in addition to their inherent advantages of good reading atmosphere.

The sincere Bookstore made a lot of fuss about the exhibition space. It continued to spread out in the shops, and did not operate for 24 hours, but also formed the interaction between books and non books.

The bookstore carries out more than 3000 theme projects and cultural marketing activities every year. In total, over 400 lecturers have been invited, 2000 lectures have been held, and 170 thousand members have paid for them.

The online bookstore business model is no longer just selling books. It combines Web2.0's network sharing concept to create an open "Information Center".

The key words in the search bar of this bookstore website can not only find books in the relevant stations, but also link them with related articles outside the station to form a systematic browsing logic. If readers enter websites, even if they do not buy books, they can also get inspiration and information.

Chishui Tang Bookstore specializes in academic simplified books.

This bookstore has targeted customers as teachers and students in Taiwan universities. From store manager to shop assistant, they have rich professional knowledge and warm service attitude.

They not only sell books, but also thirst for deeper guidance readers to provide more reading experience.

What is more distinctive is that consumers can discuss with their shop assistants before they buy books, or exchange their reading experiences, which is no substitute for the bestseller list launched by the strong bookstore.

Besides characteristic management, e-commerce is convenient and fast, but consumers' needs for experience can not be met, especially for large-scale e-commerce websites.

If the category killer has chosen the "desperate strategy", from a vertical category, through the fine management and operation of the category, creating a pleasant and convenient shopping experience, and ensuring fast delivery, it can also attract a large number of consumers.

Zappos, an American shoe retailer, is known for its strong sense of consumer experience. It once threatened Amazon with annual sales of over $10 billion.

Zappos fully realizes that shoes are more experienced than consumer goods such as clothes and accessories, so they pay special attention to consumers' sense of experience in business.

On the company's website, every shoe has a photo taken from 8 different angles.

Although the company has more than 58 thousand shoe styles in 2004, they still insist on taking pictures manually so that customers can choose.

More specifically, Zappos encourages customers to order more than one pair of shoes. When the goods arrive, choose the most suitable pair or pairs, and the shoes that are inappropriate and undesirable can be returned free of charge.

On the after sale service, Zappos also makes consumers feel more intimate.

The company can not only return the goods for free, but also carry out the delayed payment after sale, that is, customers can not pay for the goods within 90 days of buying their products, thus greatly reducing the pressure of consumers' purchasing decisions.

At the same time, the company can provide 70% customers free within 48 hours.

This consummate shopping experience service has made Zappos famous for its reputation. Although the cost of goods consumption is higher than that of other e-commerce websites, they have won a large number of loyal customers.

In order to block Zappos, Amazon has launched an independent shoe sales website Endless.com, but whether it is website visits or sales, the company has obviously lost to Zappos, so Amazon had to spend $870 million in 2009 to acquire the "dead rival".

In addition, the more complex a product is, the more consumers need to train it to use the product. The more personalized marketing is needed, the more difficult it is for e-commerce websites.

This is most obvious in the cosmetics industry. Those internationally renowned cosmetic brands have products for different ages and different skin types. Most consumers are willing to complete the purchase after experiencing, trying, or even accepting skin tests.

Although many e-commerce websites play the purchasing card, most consumers still habitually doubt their authenticity, and prefer to buy it from a physical store or a brand direct website.

To sum up, in the continuous product category change, the category killer needs to improve the flexibility of the commodity, while keeping sober about how to develop and interpret its own brand.

That is to say, they need to keep commercial sensitivity at all times, streamline the categories that can not benefit from the assets of enterprises, and introduce new products that need to be combined with the assets of enterprises to consume, and continuously enhance service and characteristic management, so that the sales volume will have a qualitative leap to get more meat from the plate of giant competitors.