Adapting to the high street of the future, retailers are continuing to transform their multichannel strategies to boost sales and tackle the success of online sellers such as Amazon and eBay. By merging channels to bring online in-store, as HMV plans to do, high street shops can increase footfall by becoming enticing virtual and social shopping ‘showrooms’. But how will taking a multichannel approach to the instore experience benefit retailers, and what will this mean for both the physical store and the consumer shopping experience itself?
Complete with cafés, free WiFi, mobile recharging points, virtual changing rooms and giant video walls, consumers have never have had so much choice – will they buy through instore Wifi? Click & collect? Via mobile? Use an app? – and while retailers will want to understand the business case for each investment, now is the time to travel hopefully and find out what works.
Supported by research in Capgemini’s recent Digital Shopper Report - that shoppers are not loyal to one sales channel over another – choice of channel, along with in store Vs online sales concerns, will become irrelevant and should see retailers placing focal importance on ensuring an overall sales boost across all merging channels, in store and out. And as the report states, 56% of consumers would spend more in a physical store if they have previously researched online, a multichannel showroom store of this nature can allow customers to do both, and have a coffee while they’re at it.
About the Author: K3 The Retail Blogger
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I think that in some circumstances it is a brilliant idea to make the shopping experience more technology based, i.e. HMV. However, I don’t believe that clothes shops are necessarily the correct environment. How can you truly know how a piece of clothing will look on you, if you don’t try it on?
This article shows some innovative ideas to help stimulate and save the high street however I personally feel that we are trying to change what currently is an interactive and social hobby or experience into something lacking sole. Do we not all spend enough time in front of a screen be it our phone, television, iPad or computer? High street shopping is about touching the item you want, benefitting from the service that is offered in retail stores and having the feeling of satisfaction and delight once purchased?
I do however think that anything which offers offline shoppers convenience when shopping in store is a benefit just not sure its right for me.
UK retailer need to keep up with the times and be part of a changing process for driving sales, this is a glitzy concept but the real way of winning shoppers over will come from using mobile and tablets to show off what you have in-store.
This is part of the new trend for customers towards ROPO (Research Online Purchase Offline). If a company can take advantage of this and get the customers to research online while in store then the conversion rate would increase because the convenience of purchasing offline is greater than what it would be if they were researching in their house and had to travel to buy. Not only that but the idea of a digital changing room is fantastic.