How are e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar retail influencing each other?
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011How are e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar retail influencing each other?
Opening Keynote speaker Keith Anderson, Senior Analyst at the RetailNet Group responds:
For the first phase of e-commerce (essentially the last 15 years), most business models were based on the assumption that e-commerce was a substitute for physical retail.
For some shoppers, categories, and trips, it is—and will increasingly be over the next decade. But driving the next phase of e-commerce innovation is the idea that online-offline integration can be even more transformational. We’re about to undergo a major transition from the majority of shopping experiences being “pure-analog” to the majority being digitally-influenced.
One of my clients, a multichannel retailer among the largest in the country, told me this week that around half of the traffic to their site is from shoppers looking for information about the store—operating hours, local events & promotions, or doing product research.
Mobile search, proximity-driven offers, and local inventory transparency will increasingly influence outlet choice. List-building and list management apps will have major impacts on basket size and mix. Ratings and reviews are already often a factor in brand or SKU choice.
It’s also increasingly common to see retailers offer an “endless aisle” via in-store kiosks or tablets. So retailers aren’t just supporting their stores with their sites, they’re supporting their sites with their stores.
Some in the CPG industry think that e-commerce is only relevant to high-involvement categories like electronics and media like books, music, and video.
But we have hard data that shows that shoppers will increasingly use technology to make key decisions—or let the technology make the decisions for them.
Learn more from Anderson at the conference:
The Smarter Shopper: Marketing to the Digital Consumer
Tue – Wed, September 20-21, 2011
Stamford, CT
Register now >
Don’t forget – Use the code “digitalcpg” at registration for a 10% discount just for DigitalCPG.com readers!








