Smart Retailers Don’t Bring Consumers To Stores, But Bring Stores To Consumers

Retail is set to change as never before as COVID-19 fades, but the digital shift will only continue — and even expand. Karen Webster says smart retailers must learn five lessons if they want to survive and thrive in the new era.

“The digital shift, as PYMNTS defines it, is doing less in the physical world and more in the digital world for the same activity,” Webster wrote in a recent analysis on how traditional retailers must adapt.

She noted PYMNTS surveys have found that more than 124 million Americans have already made a shift to shopping online for retail goods, groceries and restaurant food. And more than 75 percent of consumers told PYMNTS they plan to keep doing so even after the pandemic ends.

Lessons that Webster believes traditional brick-and-mortar merchants must take to heart include the idea that “Retail is now about logistics and the last mile,” and “Retail’s competition is the marketplace, not other category competitors.” 

And another key takeaway she sees is: “It’s not what the consumer can do for the store — it’s what the store can do for the consumer.”

“Consumers have a newfound appreciation for time, and for the digital tools that make it easy for them to save that time and shift it to other, more valuable activities,” Webster wrote in her analysis. “Retail’s [survivors] will recognize that reality, and will invest in the digital tools and technologies that don’t force consumers into the physical store, but bring the physical store to them.”

For instance, Webster wrote that smart retailers will invest in things like video apps to allow consumers to talk to salespeople over Zoom, and also provide tools like augmented reality so customers can “try on” outfits or makeup virtually.

Successful companies will “enable stylists, designers and knowledgeable store associates to interact with a shopper, show her things that she might want to buy, curate a room of furniture or an outfit, show her how to apply makeup and make the store less the destination than a virtual showroom that she can engage with over Zoom,” Webster wrote.

“Retail’s survivors will turn the in-store buying experience on its head,” she said. “Rather than forcing consumers to make the sale in the store, [they] will enable the sale to be made in the home after a series of those video encounters — up to and even including bringing those items into the consumer’s home for them to see, or maybe even try, before they buy.”

Companies like Marque Luxury, which sells used handbags from Chanel, Gucci and other high-end designers to retailers and end consumers, are doing just that.

Although the firm mostly operates online, it’s been adding brick-and-mortar showrooms that the retailers it supplies can use for in-person or video conferences with consumers.

“This is a unique product type, [and] the biggest variable is condition,” Marque Founder and President Quentin Caruana recently told PYMNTS. “Having the ability to touch and feel the product is so important that it becomes difficult for customers to buy online.”

Webster said traditional merchants who adopt such technologies can not only survive, but even thrive in the digital-first era.

“These options save the consumer time,” she wrote, “and time is the currency that consumers now think long and hard about before spending it.”