You would think they would have learned their lesson. After giving Amazon a 10-year (really closer to 15 when you come right down to it) head start in the ecommerce business and then failing to understand how important both the Prime program and free shipping were to the success of buying online, traditional retailers are once again losing out to Amazon’s enormous advantage when it comes to automatic checkout stores that use AI technology. Closing in on three decades since Jeff Bezos sold his first book out of a local warehouse, the rest …
Technology
Prioritizing Brand Protection Before the Holiday Rush
Counterfeits pose a dangerous threat to any retail brand. Since every single sale is a pivotal branding opportunity, especially for young, burgeoning eCommerce brands, an online marketplace flooded with counterfeits can be particularly dangerous. One in five customers will boycott a brand after mistakenly purchasing a counterfeit product, and that’s not the kind of ratio that any retailer –– from the smallest Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) site to the behemoths like Amazon –– can afford to ignore. In the age of online reviews, it’s especially …
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Every Customer Is a Premium Shopper
With 30 years in the industry, I am still in awe of the changes that food retailers have undergone recently. But the current situation is no longer about being customer centric enough to make fast-paced, short-term tweaks to satisfy customer needs. It's a massive transformation that will change how food retailers grow, consolidate, and defend their market position for decades to come. There's so much opportunity in being a customer-adaptive retailer. And perhaps the most important advantage is the ability to establish a personal relationship …
The Empress’s New-ish Clothes
The value propositions of Rent the Runway, The RealReal and Stitch Fix are indisputable. As these concepts grew quickly through the 2010s, the digitally-driven rental, resale and subscription business models induced dopamine rushes in the fashionista set and strategic anxiety among fashion industry execs. Profit Proposition Yet RENT and REAL gush red ink – arterially. Even pre-pandemic. SFIX was nominally profitable until the pandemic and is now back to profitability in its most recent quarter, but the company’s multiple growth …
Retailers Future-Proof the In-Store Experience with Digital Precision
Lately, though, this “dot the i's and cross the t's” mindset has gone by the wayside more frequently than is ideal. We know that the most enjoyable and exciting shopping experiences happen when it's clear that associates care not just about the retail and product brand but also their interactions with their customers. However, we often question whether such an experience is enough to entice people to buy from the same brand at any other store location The Rising Complexity of "Getting It Right" Retail has always been a detail industry. …
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The Metaverse Reimagines Retail
The metaverse is ascendant. The term, generated in science fiction and frequently applied to gaming platforms is trending in the commercial marketplace. Google searches for the buzzword have increased 100 percent since March 2021. The CEOs of Microsoft and Facebook in recent months have spoken in detail about their companies' commitment to its development. If the future metaverse were a straight-line iteration of the game-based worlds we currently observe in Fortnite, Roblox, or Animal Crossing, there would be no need for this article. But the …
Why Legacy Retailers Are Moving to TikTok and Other Video Tools
Email marketing is dead. A full inbox causes stress and anxiety, and it doesn’t facilitate purchasing. This is especially true among next-gens, who prefer almost any other communication tool to inbox-centric dialogue. A 2020 study from consulting firm Creative Strategies found that there’s a generational gap in the platforms that respondents use for work. Those 30 and older use email among their top collaboration tools, while the under 30 crowd uses Google Docs most often for collaboration, closely followed by Zoom and iMessage. Legacy …
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Shoppable Livestreams Break Through
The success of Chinese livestream shopping has been well documented since it exploded early in the pandemic, and what looked like a stop-gap solution has developed into an established retail channel. Livestreaming was a straightforward evolution in the well-developed Chinese social-retail ecosystem dominated by well-compensated KOLs (key opinion leaders) who transitioned from posting on WeChat or Weibo to livestreaming on Douyin, broadcast from the empty stores and malls during the pandemic shutdowns. By contrast, the pandemic spurred a …