Big Retailers Don’t Get It – Embracing The Web and Online Shopping

Retail Outlet

This comes off the back of the news that yet another Australian retail giant has decided to cannibalize stores and create a “dominant” presence on the interwebs. This combined with Myers and David Jones’ lobbying to introduce mandatory GST on imports is tantamount to a big kid in primary school throwing a fit of rage just because he lost the race. These giants are fighting the web which happens to have a far greater reach in people’s lives than their brick and mortar stores. Any smart CEO should have picked up the trend 5 years ago and worked his team to embrace it. But no! They sat there and it wasn’t until it became inevitable that online shopping was going to chip away on their profits did they wake up.

But wait! Do the stores really need to close? Will we really end up seeing a number of jobless salespeople? What is yet to be realized is the use of brick and mortar presence as a demo ground, an influencing stage where salespersons don’t sell stuff to you but educate you about it.

The real worry here isn’t the fact that online shopping is soaring but that much of the cash is lost to overseas retailers. Hey! it wasn’t me who asked the local retailers to get greedy. Myers only recently came up with a drop-ship supply model to ensure profitability. There perhaps can’t be a more cost effective platform to deliver goods to the customers that the interwebs BUT this requires customer engagement. How many retail stores maintain blogs about what they stock? How many of them make an honest effort at “communicating” with you, the customer, through social media? Retailers must re-think their supply chains and marketing or turn into a Titanic.

Biggest isn’t always the best, gravity has its ways.