Consumers and the Changing Face of Retail

Shop, click, buy, experience

For today’s consumer shopping has a whole new meaning. You can shop for everything from a coffee maker to shoes online. You can download coupons on your iPhone and cash them at a store down the street. eCommerce is capturing a greater portion of sales and building more individual relationships with customers.  Yet some experiences are interactive and can only be one on one, personal, tangible. Walking into the local coffee house can’t be duplicated online. The desire to experience smells, sounds and the human interaction of a physical place— the desire of customers to “be some  place” —is more visceral than the act of acquiring something needed. Speaking with the local vendors at the farmers market and holding the perfect cantaloupe is truly a hands on experience.

What is a shopping experience and what does it mean for retailers?

Retail environments are no longer what they used to be. Shopping is now no longer a trip to a store on a street with a window front. It’s an eCommerce site that’s a click away, or checking out 20 stores in 15 minutes for the best deal and the best features. It’s big box warehouses located with other big boxes far from a downtown, it’s a mall of pricy stores clustered together in a high-end mall or the branded complex of top brand stores right off the freeway.

Retailers small and big need to understand how customers seek experience.
Customers are using new shopping environments in their own way to find both experiences and products they need for the life they want. It’s really a multi-channel world that consumers live in and the quicker both big and small retailers realize this the more they will grow overall sales and know much more about customers in the process.