How To Protect The Physical Store Under The Impact Of The Electricity Supplier

With the continuous development of Internet technology, the electricity supplier has already become a trend. Under the impact of the electricity supplier, how to keep the entity store has become the distress of many businessmen.

Not only

The impact of traditional industries, such as foreign Amazon, is also collapsing, trying to swallow the cake that traditional retail industry has made over the years.

The electricity supplier attacks, the tradition takes over.

Today, when the amount of web search is far higher than that of the entity buyer, how will the traditional retail giants cope with the development of the weak physical stores?

The impact of the electricity supplier is nowhere to run - the retail industry has been struggling for the past year.

Even the traditional retailers were hit hard: Nord Sturm (a US Department Store) performed poorly on Nasdaq, and Messi's department store could not escape. By the end of 2015, its stock price had dropped by 40%, while WAL-MART supermarket had closed more than 250 stores nationwide.

Why do bad news follow?

There are some occasional factors behind this situation.

Such as low consumption and high savings real economy, and the fourth quarter "inappropriate" warm climate, so that people do not buy warm stove or overcoat and other traditional winter products.

However, behind the consumption of traditional retail businesses, there are also reasons like Amazon, a small company in Seattle.

The phagocytosis here is "a mouthful of fat".

According to the data of Motley Fool (Moore rich), a US investment website and a successful example of small and medium investors, 1/3 of all product searches happen on Amazon.

Think of what these things mean for traditional retailing: 1/3 of their potential customers now choose to go shopping on Amazon, leaving the traditional retail industry at the expense of the rest of the scraps. At the same time, in order to get users, they spend a lot of money on the advertisers like Google and Facebook (and sacrifice a lot of gross profits).

And as Amazon continues to strengthen its Prime services (Prime is Amazon's paid member projects, it enjoys free postage, fast delivery and online content services), and their customer base is becoming bigger and bigger, and loyalty is also increasing.

No, I never tried.

It's not that the traditional retail industry has been mediocre.

Over the years, they have been investing heavily in planning the electricity supplier market to enhance their experience and logistics network, and strive to compete with those multi-channel market leaders.

However, labor costs, marketing promotion, network cloud infrastructure and platform investment mean huge costs and the same huge revenue expectations needed to cover these costs.

So although the online sales of giants such as Nord Sturm have been strikingly growing, the growth of this part still can not offset the impact of the weakening of physical stores.

Under such circumstances, what will the future of retailers (large or small) be?

The development trend is mainly reflected in three aspects.

1. Only flagship stores.

Because forced to cut costs, more business will be directed to e-commerce providers.

Traditional retailers have to continue to close some physical shops, only to set up flagship stores in some prosperous areas, such as Bellevue Square in Seattle, South Coast Plaza in southern California and Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Although the reasons behind the current plight are diverse, such as macroeconomic weakness, logistics difficulties and weak brand image, the shrinking line sales and fixed rent and personnel costs are a much more obvious loss.

With the booming of large cities, changing population structure has become a key factor in the development of retail industry.

We are seeing a few joys and worries about the development of the suburbs and the store of retailers.

After the reduction in the number of stores, traditional retailers can manage more effectively to create more comfortable inside experience, stronger sales ability and better digital display.

These flagship stores in the core blocks of the city will play the role of "brand galleries" and become channels to connect to the local community, just like the Genius Bar in Apple Corp's direct store, and the new concept coffee shop of the first capital of the United States. Capital One, a diversified international financial group, opened a cross-border space mixed with banks and coffee shops in Union Square in New York.

Further continuous online investment also includes strengthening multi-channel supply capabilities, such as offline pick-up and return services.

Thanks to personalized customization and geographically based message push, these "Logistics Oriented" behaviors will greatly increase store revenue.

These shirts don't look good on their bodies.

It's okay. We have something else.

To pick up the skirt you bought?

You don't deserve this pair of shoes?

These enhanced version of store experience will become the basic way of traditional retailing against Amazon.

But this mode will appear in big cities and big markets.

Consumers who live in small cities will drive several times a year for a "shopping trip".

So the multi-purpose flagship center providing entertainment, dining and accommodation options will be the biggest beneficiaries.

Contemporary consumers are looking for more than just satisfaction at the product level.

Our business goal is to create happiness, and strive to seek multi industry collaboration to jointly optimize the customer's visiting experience.

Last year, Bellevue Collection shopping center in Seattle attracted 23 million people, a large number of them came from hundreds of miles away.

We believe that large commercial integration has more advantages in creating excellent user experience than those in single use spaces.

Our customers come here with a purpose, such as shopping, but when they buy something, they choose to have dinner with us and watch movies.

Sometimes they even spend the night.

Two. The rise of service design.

The concept of service design will not only become known to everyone, but will increase its radius of influence.

Unlike UX design, information architecture or the "user experience design" that is now defined, service designers today play the role of "bridge" connecting online and offline.

The role is half the researcher, half the digital strategy analyst, and sometimes even extended to some aspects of traditional architecture.

With the expansion of online experience, we can expect to see more changes in store layout, checkout technology and indoor orientation.

These changes will not be successful without the help of people who fully understand the significance of customer experience from pixel to parking.

Service designers should lead a whole team of designers from different fields to seize a main line for customer centered research.

Although the initial opening will exceed the resulting conversion benefits, these design results will enhance customer loyalty and brand awareness.

Chris Risdon, chief design officer of first capital Capital One Labs, believes that the key to success in service industry is understanding customer behavior:

"It has nothing to do with market segmentation, but also has nothing to do with sales channels. This is related to customer behavior.

Research, understanding, design and helping customers achieve their desired shopping behavior is the key.

They want to buy, try, or return products. They want to do a lot of things at different time periods and "contact points" (touch points, marketing channels for consumers' interaction with business entities).

As a retailer, everything you do must focus on how to enhance users' desires and help them achieve what they already want to do.

Three, open joint

What do you do when you meet a strong opponent?

Let's team up.

Like the early twentieth Century.

In the cooperative system, businesses that have mutual recognition and no competition have joined hands to form some informal alliances.

Why?

Because although there are many differences between target consumers and products, the problems they face are similar.

They will seek win-win solutions to solve common challenges, such as:

Sales Attribution - Multi - channel and multi - device today, how to measure and determine where the sales volume comes from?

Software solution -- do you want to build an internal team or outsource the work?

Which supplier is the best?

From customer relationship management and analysis to search technology and cloud computing hosting, hundreds of choices have to be made on this road.

Logistics -- who is the best partner for pportation, and who is the storage and inventory control to whom?

Is it for the third party or the establishment of its own logistics team?

Nathan Decker, director of e-commerce at MITSUBISHI motor, said that solving this problem is particularly important for small and medium retailers, because they are unable to accumulate expert teams in all aspects due to insufficient scale.

"To master electronic commerce requires a startling breadth of knowledge.

Professionals need to analyze and calculate complex data and possess sophisticated business negotiation skills to compete with competitors in logistics, information technology, data and finance.

It is impossible for a person to go deep into all these aspects, so complementary cooperation among different industries is very important today.

Only when we have time precipitation and experience accumulation can we help others, and vice versa.

Listen to people's words, win ten years of reading.

Last but not least, tradition is novelty.

Of course, the future of the retail industry is just one of the big scenes.

The first wave of e-commerce has taken many traditional retailers on the beach.

Seattle's Blue Nile and Amazon have played a key role in the elimination and heavy losses of many industries, ranging from Barnes&Noble (Blue Nile above is the US online diamond and jewelry retailer, Barnes&Noble is the largest physical bookstore in the US) to the family jewelry store.

The second wave, often referred to as the "online joint offline" mode, gives many traditional retailers a chance to catch up quickly, that is, investing in online e-commerce stations, and linking their offline stores and online parts.

Now, we are in the third wave -- "pure game", those from

The retailer born in the opposite direction extends to the real economy.

Blue Nile, Warby Parker, Indochino (plator Warby Parker to make glasses online customization, Indochino is a Canadian menswear custom company) or even Amazon, are trying different degrees of entity store.

What about the fourth wave?

The further tightening of physical shops in the future is not a controversial matter.

The more challenging question is, where will the retail war between "offline" and "online" go?

One thing is for sure: traditional retailers need to constantly adjust the situation and adjust their strategies flexibly, because Amazon and the social changes it has created are already here, and will always be there.