The Online And Offline Integration Of Fast Fashion Brand GAP

Congenital advantages of GAP

From the three aspects of attracting users, transforming users and retaining users, GAP, a traditional well-known brand name, has many inherent advantages compared with pure e-commerce brand when developing direct e-business channels.

　 Cross channel promotion:

What is the first major difficulty in running e-commerce websites? create Traffic, just as a big shopping mall first wants to worry about is how to make more potential customers walk into their own gates, so many e-commerce websites' cost expenditures are at the expense of marketing promotion. At the initial stage of GAP, the company first made full use of its vast network of physical stores to promote its publicity, including advertising posters in the shops to publicize the addresses of its own shopping websites, and letting the staff of the cashier to give oral recommendations to the customers who were paying the bill. Even in some key shops, they provided links to gap.com machines to let customers try.

Lower user acceptance threshold:

When a shopping website successfully attracts potential users to visit, the second important task is how to promote the actual transformation of these users, that is, simply browse to the order. Even in developed countries such as the United States, brand trust is one of the most important factors that affect a user's order on an e-commerce website. GAP has been through several decades of physical store operation to enable users to understand and familiarity with their brand, and build and maintain a good brand reputation. Therefore, users will naturally pass the trust when considering whether to purchase from the e-commerce website of GAP, so as to enhance the conversion rate of initial shopping.

　　 Through excellent service Retain users:

Once the user has passed the threshold of the first online shopping, the third important task that follows is how to retain these users. Here, GAP company ensures the loyalty of users through excellent service, and the foundation of providing these services is precisely because of the backing of physical stores.

Replacement service :

If you place orders and receive goods on a "pure mouse" shopping website, it is not particularly satisfactory, for example. clothes The size is not appropriate and needs to be returned, how to mail the goods on hand is a headache, but if it is in GAP's e-commerce website, the type of shopping problem is very simple. In addition to sending back the mail, users can also choose to receive the goods nearby to get their familiar offline stores.

Clothes changing service:

For the Banana Republic brand with relatively high-end positioning, if users buy clothes online, they need to make minor modifications, such as adjusting trousers length, etc., and they can easily get the goods to offline stores for free services, so that users can feel more secure when buying online.

These inherent advantages above are the reasons for ensuring that GAP group's shopping website groups can bring benefits from direct sales figures. At the same time, these shopping website groups also provide a large amount of non direct benefits to the group, including the enhancement of the overall brand reputation, providing seamless integration and consistent shopping experience for customers, and collecting a lot of valuable consumer behavior data. For example, all online customers' behaviors can be recorded by the backstage system, including browsing and finally purchased goods, past web pages, buying frequency and habits, etc.

These data will be very difficult if they want to be collected by traditional offline stores. Once a brand tried to use RFID wireless technology to mark every item of clothing in the store, hoping to track which items were brought to the fitting room by the customer, and finally, because of the high cost of execution and the Limited effect, it could not be resolved.

It is precisely because of these direct and indirect benefits that GAP group has long established the importance of building e-commerce channels as one of the core strengths of its own competitive strategy, and has made a lot of support from its organizational structure, policies and implementation.

For example, the electronic business operation team is independently set up as a more flexible department, instead of being attached to the traditional shop sales system, and even to improve efficiency and spare no effort to build an independent warehousing system for the operation of its shopping website, and from the incentive and management system to provide online online orders and customers with good service support as one of the evaluation indicators, it is sent to various entity stores.

Reverse drive Physical store Shop sales

If in the early stage of the integration of online and offline channel strategy, most of which are drained and supported by emerging online channels through the traditional offline channels of GAP, then the GAP group's website has been foothold. How to make better use of these established influence and user groups to drive the sale of physical stores in reverse direction is more important.

In particular, the overall economic environment in the United States is still in the doldrums, which has a significant impact on the sales volume of physical stores. A recent example is the GAP group launched a website called OldNavyweekly.com in early 2009 for its cheap mass brand Old Navy (OldNavy), which has achieved good results in guiding online users to go offline.