Shoppers Need A Reason To Go To Your Store — Other Than Buying Stuff

The holiday season, which is by far the most important time of year for retailers, highlights the increasingly intense battle between physical stores and online websites. Given the large number of casualties this year — witness the bankruptcy filings of such venerable institutions as Toys ‘R Us, The Limited, H.H. Gregg, Gander Mountain, Payless Shoes, and RadioShack, to name but a few — retailers must finally wake up to the core terrain over which they’re fighting: customers’ time. Online retailers offer consumers time well saved. People can find what they want, when they want it, with incredible ease and convenience, and with the physical good shipped directly to their homes in a matter of days (and increasingly, in large cities, hours). As often as not, they don’t even have to pay shipping costs, and returns are a relative breeze. While the U.S. Census Bureau puts e-commerce’s share of the U.S. retail market at less than 10% as of the first quarter of 2017, online sales are growing at almost 10% per year. Should that trend continue — and it appears to be accelerating slightly — online retailing will account for nearly 20% of the total in 2025, over 30% in 2030, and about 50% in 2035. To address this threat, one path physical retailers can take, of course, is to compete by going online themselves and even using their physical stores as a pickup spot — a strategy that many bricks-and-mortar retailers have taken. (One retailer I know saw a 35% bump in sales when it gave customers the option of picking up merchandise in its stores that they had bought online.) Read more at Harvard Business Review.