Client Onestop Internet Featured on TheStreet.
Amazon is planning to open 100 pop-up stores by the end of 2017. ModCloth, a women’s clothing company that started by selling online exclusively, is opening a permanent bricks-and-mortar location in Austin, Texas. Meanwhile, Walmart is slowing new store openings, opting to focus efforts on e-commerce instead.
What does this all mean? The online/offline divide is narrowing, and all retailers should be thinking about commerce as a whole, rather than treating online and offline as two separate entities. According to a recent report from UPS, 38% of today’s purchases involve both online and offline activity — whether that’s researching a product online and buying in store, researching in store and buying online, or some combination of the two.
Retailers hoping to thrive in today’s competitive climate need to focus on consumer engagement and experience across all channels. This means desktop, mobile, tablet and bricks-and-mortar locations, and retailers should be tailoring their engagement strategies to best suit each channel, while also ensuring a seamless, consistent customer experience. The way you engage a consumer online is going to be vastly different from how you’d reach that consumer in a store.
Bricks-and-mortar locations present the unique opportunity to cultivate a physical brand experience. For luxury retailers, this can be especially important as it allows consumers to immerse themselves in the brand’s story and understand why they are paying a premium. Consider what Sonos, a wireless speaker and home sound system company has done with its SoHo store.
The company built the showroom to look and feel like someone’s home rather than a traditional retail location. The showroom boasts seven listening rooms, each one blocked off from the rest of the store with walls meant to absorb and reflect sound for a better listening experience. Visitors are shown a brief introductory video and are then free to queue up their favorite tunes and play around with the various speaker combinations each space offers.
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