Shopping As A Key Social Activity
This is a fact, a lot of people, whether you agree or disagree, consider grocery shopping or shopping in general as a hobby. They like going to the mall on their spare time. Actually, we can consider that shopping is one of the key social activity a person has to do. Shopping malls and Marts are the places where you could meet the most people.
A lot of people considered that ebusiness will probably kill the mortar retails, because they would not be able to be as competitive in terms of service, quickness and, mainly, prices. Looking a little bit backward, we can see that Ebusiness has defenitely became a key part of retailing, but it hasn't really much affected traditional retails profitablity.
The Human Dimension In Retailing
One of the main strength retails will always have, and the main reason why they will always exist, is because of the human dimension. The human contact with a salesperson, cashier, or even with other customers is something valuable. Of course, the web 2.0 brought some kind of answers to this problem. You can create, share with, and animate a community. But this will never replace human contact. Therefore we can see now a lot of online companies starting opening some retails to complete their online services, especially in terms of after sale services.
Ebusiness must focus on customer relationsip
Ebusiness has though some great strengths and tools to build up a good customer relationship. You have some extensive access to customer data, which enables you to analyse shoper behavior, the bid, and your convertion rates. You also have some multemedia interfaces, some complete product descriptions, user reviews and so on. Therefore, I believe that one of the main focus in order to establish some sustainable success for an online retailer is to develop some kind of interaction with visitors, shoppers, and customers.
However, I also believe that traditional retails still have a bright future ahead of them, as long as they'll be able to keep their technology and information systems up to date, and keep a link with some Internet applications that will reinforce customer's experience.
Retail Marketing
Also, due to these facts, and in order to keep a high customer satisfaction rate, retailers must push their marketing effort, in order to insure a strong customer experience. This customer experience, based on the human dimension, is the base of the business, and retailers can not any longer focus only on their supply chain and product display, but think about what kind of service they can provide to customers in order to please them and make them come back.
