The growth of e-business
has allowed the development of a number of business models including a large
number of online pure-play models.
However in the past year,
we’ve noticed a number of originally “online only” players starting to enter
the offline market. We’ll try to understand the origins of this trend and give
some examples of how online pure-play businesses can use offline channels.
While online shops have
caused a lot of brick-and-mortar businesses to close shop, they still lack a
few characteristics that customer’s value such as:
- Tactility
- Instant delivery
- Social interaction
By investing in the
offline market, online sellers are looking for innovative ways to bridge the
gap and make up for these flaws. Some of the most innovative ways to do so
include:
• E-bay opened a
temporary pop-up shop in London during the holiday season where it featured
images with QR codes and recommendations driven by social networks.
• Similarly, Etsy
opened a pop-up shop in New York with laptops to show their entire shop
catalogs and mobile devices serving as POS terminals via Square and PayPal.
• Another big trend is
the shopping walls developed by Tesco for instance with their giant poster in
Korean subways where people could take out their mobiles, scan the products
they need and have them delivered to their houses, saving a significant amount
of time. Now, its virtual stores are also found in bus shelters and have
produced 130% increase in online sales and 76% new registrations for Tesco online.
This innovation was
further developed using a similar technology and the XBOX kinect to allow
customers to literally reach out and grab the products they want from their TV
Using pop-up shops and
other offline channels allow online sellers to:
• Make efficient use
of retail space, with lower inventory
• Measure engagement
and conversion rates
• Attract new
customers
• Support real-time
social electronic shopping
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire