Physical Department Transformation Of Mobile Platform Is The Ultimate Test Of The Whole Channel

Retail giant WAL-MART CEO Mike Duke once said: "retailers are at the starting point of the economic era of SoLoMoMe (Social social +Local localization +Mobile mobile +Me self)." The sales feature of this era is to use social networking to find the easiest way to buy, to pay by mobile terminals, and eventually to express individuality. In this era, retailers have to keep pace. Where the consumer is, the retailer's channels will be laid out.

　　 E-commerce seeks to settle down

Recently, My-wardrobe, the British fashion e-commerce group, announced that it will open its first physical store in June 30th. My-wardrobe has become the first electricity supplier in the UK to open a physical store, but in fact, the La Garconne, Nasty Gal and Warby Parker of the US have already started the mode of co operation under the online and offline businesses.

Everyone says that this is an era of electronic commerce. Why do these well-known businesses have to go the opposite way and start laying solid channels?

Although My-wardrobe said that continuous cash inflow and increasingly accumulated losses caused the company to fall into a serious financial crisis, setting up a physical store is an important step to save the future of the company. However, no matter how it looks, it feels that this step is not a helpless move, but rather like a rainy day.

For the fashion industry, although e-commerce is fast and convenient, but the sale of fashionable products, such as clothing, shoes and so on, is always limited, and consumers are troubled by the product's expectations. As Terry Lundgren, director of the Messi department store in the retail industry for 30 years, said, for clothing products, customers' habits always touch and try before deciding to buy.

How to break through the dilemma? Online and offline double line is the solution. Therefore, the realization of full channel retailing not only causes the attention of traditional retailers, but also leads to more and more pure e-commerce platforms. They see that the traditional format that has a long history seems unlikely to fail for half a time because of e-commerce, but many powerful stores are better at the whole channel development.

　　 Entity transformation All channels modify

When many retail stores are still considering how not to become a fitting room for the e-commerce era, Messi stores in the United States are bold enough to say that one channel can not fall, where consumers will buy and where Messi will sell.

As one of the first retail businesses, Messi stores launched its shopping website in 1996. Although the income was only $30 thousand a year, Terry Lundgren believed that the Internet might lead to a different business model in the future. At the beginning of the development of e-commerce platform, it was asked whether Terry Lundgren was worried that customers would only go online shopping instead of shops. Terry Lundgren's answer is, "no, the only thing I worry about is that they go shopping on other websites instead of mine. Customers are changing and retailers must follow them. "

Through analyzing the buying behavior of customers, Messi finds that most consumers do not shop on the Internet or only in physical stores, but they have both. They choose to purchase channels according to their own circumstances and needs. Terry Lundgren said: "the interaction between the two channels online and offline has a very strong effect, and consumers who use two channels to buy more than twice the consumption of a single channel."

Compared with My-wardrobe, the cost of Messi's department store is much lower. Today, Messi's online business has annual sales of over $1 billion, and its investment in IT infrastructure is about $300 million. In addition, Messi stores have more than 800 stores in the United States. When online channels are opened, more than 800 stores have evolved into experience centers and distribution centers. As an e-commerce enterprise, to achieve offline sales, it is not just a simple set of facilities, they need to control a lot of manpower and financial resources, involving location, rent, display and other practical problems. Because of this, physical department stores are more confident in the development of all channels. "After all, traditional department stores are good at building warehouses."

　　 Mobile platform The ultimate test.

In the final analysis, the emergence of any form of sales stems from changes in consumption habits. The so-called "full channel development" means that retailers must take consumers as the center and make use of the hottest social platforms at present to achieve sales so as to satisfy consumers' needs of shopping anywhere and anytime.

In addition to e-commerce platform, Macy's Now more emphasis is placed on building mobile terminal platforms. They have opened accounts on Twitter and Facebook respectively, attracting a large number of fans. In this regard, the person in charge said that the combination of entities, Internet and mobile terminals can be called today's all channels. The mobile platform is the ultimate test of the three. Therefore, Messi department store is constantly improving its equipment to support new payment technologies like Google wallet.

The research results of IDC Retail Insights, a market research firm, show that, compared with single channel consumers, multi-channel consumers spend more on 15%~30% on average, while consumers of all channels spend an average of 20% more than multi-channel consumers. More importantly, consumers from all channels will also share other consumers through social media and online activities, thereby affecting more people.

Retail giant WAL-MART CEO Mike Duke once said: "retailers are at the starting point of the economic era of SoLoMoMe (Social social +Local localization +Mobile mobile +Me self)." The sales feature of this era is to use social networking to find the easiest way to buy, to pay by mobile terminals, and eventually to express individuality.

In view of this, many department stores are trying to promote their full channel transformation with social media. With the improvement of social network Facebook payment function, a number of fashion brands are eager to try to open another sales channel through Facebook.

Social media on domestic mobile terminals also play the same role. At the end of April, the Department Store top grade discount opened in a branch store in Hangzhou. Unlike other stores, each store has a two-dimensional code. Consumers can easily realize online payment by using WeChat scanning. Even if they did not pay at the time, they could put the selected items into the shopping cart on the Internet shopping and complete the payment before the next day. Top quality discount and WeChat cooperation are just beginning. In the future, they are ready to copy the model to more cities.