20120415 Follow Me 339 Shopping and the Internet

是 否 +2 论坛币

k人 参与回答

经管之家送您一份

应届毕业生专属福利!

求职就业群

赵安豆老师微信：zhaoandou666

经管之家联合CDA

送您一个全额奖学金名额~ !

立即领取

感谢您参与论坛问题回答

经管之家送您两个论坛币！

+2 论坛币

Shopping and the Internet


Order online, pay cash in store

TERRY LUNDGREN and Kevin Ryan know and like each other. But when it comes to the future of retailing the boss of Macy’s, an American department-store giant, and the chief executive of Gilt Groupe, an online retailer, disagree wildly. Mr Lundgren remains a firm believer in an empire of bricks and mortar. Mr Ryan is betting big on online-only selling.

“It used to be catalogues killing physical stores, then it was TV shopping and now it is online retail,” says Mr Lundgren. Although he will not be pinned down on whether the internet is a threat to shopkeepers or an opportunity for them, he is convinced that his chain is on the right path. Macy’s is embracing “omnichannel” integration, that is, selling stuff on television, through mail-order catalogues and online, as well as keeping its department stores. The company runs 810 shops across America under the mid-price, mid-market Macy’s brand and 38 posher Bloomingdale’s outlets.

Mr Ryan argues that bricks-and-mortar shops are gravely threatened by Amazon and other online-only retailers, and says he can see “no evidence that there are big opportunities for traditional retailers in online retail.” Overall, retail sales in America are pretty flat, so the double-digit growth of online sellers is coming at the expense of physical shops. Amazon’s sales in the past year were $48 billion, compared with Macy’s $26 billion. Last year online sales in America reached $188 billion, about 8% of total retail sales. They are forecast to reach $270 billion by 2015 (see chart).

So far, however, Mr Lundgren has good reason not to worry that the sky is falling. On February 21st Macy’s reported fourth-quarter figures that were better than many analysts had expected. Revenue was 5.5% higher than a year earlier, at $8.7 billion. Net profits were up by 11.7%, at $745m. Most relevant for Mr Lundgren’s debate with his friendly rival, online sales from the websites of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s jumped by 40%.

This reflects Macy’s efforts to expand its online business. In January last year it said it would add nearly 3,500 full-time, part-time and seasonal staff to its online team. It is building a new logistics centre for online sales in West Virginia and expanding an existing one in Tennessee. And it is fixing a glaring flaw in its internet-sales operation: until now online shoppers have only been able to buy goods in Macy’s warehouses; soon they will be able to order items from the stock of its stores.

扫码加我 拉你入群

请注明：姓名-公司-职位

以便审核进群资格，未注明则拒绝

分享0 收藏0 回帖

关键词：Internet SHOPPING follow Intern inter online executive internet physical

Shopping by smartphone

What does seem clear is that as personal computing goes mobile people are buying more via smartphones. Four years ago hardly anyone bought things on their mobile devices but today nearly one-quarter of Gilt Groupe’s revenue comes from smartphone shoppers; on some weekends the proportion reaches 40%. Nearly one-third of people living in America own a smartphone, and 70% of these use it to do searches while they are inside a shop, usually to compare prices. “By 2014 mobile internet will overtake desktop internet usage for shopping,” predicts Nigel Morris, chief executive of Aegis Media Americas.

Although it is getting ever easier to blow your credit-card limit without leaving the sofa, there are some who still see a future for bricks-and-mortar stores. Darrell Rigby of Bain, a consultancy, says customers often still want to touch, feel and taste products. And sometimes when they want something, they want it now, and will not put up with waiting for a delivery.
Order online, pay cash in store

The most clued-up shopkeepers realise that they must make the most of such advantages over online rivals, and that to do so they must make their stores more enjoyable places to visit. Macy’s says it is investing about $400m in the renovation of its flagship store on Herald Square in New York City, which it claims is the world’s biggest department store, with 1.1m square feet (102,000 square metres) of retail space. To this Macy’s will add another 100,000 square feet, part of which will become the largest women’s shoe department in the world. The enlarged shop will also have 22 dining venues and 300 extra fitting rooms.

In 2010 Macy’s launched a training programme for its more than 130,000 sales people, “MAGIC Selling”, which coached them to be more helpful and friendlier with customers. It is tailoring the merchandise stocked in its stores more closely to local tastes. During the holiday season it sells Elvis mementos in its shops in Tennessee and Our Lady of Guadalupe ornaments in cities with big Hispanic populations.

Retailers with lavishly furnished stores and helpful assistants will increasingly have to put up with free-riders who come into the shop to check out the products and get some advice, before slinking off to buy them for less online. Shops’ best defence against “showrooming”, as this practice is called, is to stock more own-label items that are not available anywhere else.
Have you got this in my size?

However, there is no single recipe for retailing success in the internet age. Retailers will need to balance their investment between staff, locations, inventory and online operations says José Alvarez of Harvard Business School. For some expensive products it makes sense to have a low inventory, a big investment in showrooms, elaborate online operations and well qualified sales people. For more commoditised items it is more important to have a big inventory than a flashy display. Things that are increasingly being bought online must be swept off the shelves to make way for products that people still want to examine and compare before buying.

Whatever priorities retailers set, their physical stores are likely to shrink as the share of sales made online keeps rising. Retailers in America have a surfeit of space. Between 1999 and 2009 the amount of shopping space per person boomed from 18 square feet to 23 square feet. The productivity of that commercial acreage slumped after the financial crisis and shows no sign of recovering.

The retailers who will survive the drift online are the ones “listening to the dynamic demands of customers,” says Walmart’s Mr Anderson. For example, his firm recently found out that some of its recession-hit customers want to order on their smartphones but do not have credit cards. So it has let them make their orders online but come into the shop to pay cash.

Walmart’s customers can also now make their shopping list at home by just opening the fridge and uttering “milk, tomatoes and cottage cheese” through voice-recognition software. The list can then be sorted to take account of their local store’s layout, so they can make the shortest possible tour through the aisles. Shopping promises to be more fun and less hassle in future. The best retailers might enjoy themselves too.

先顶后看~

The topic is close to our daily life, for example, order online,  pay cash in store  and  surfing the Internet.

The length of the article seems too long for me.