Don’t Underestimate The Impact of a Brick and Mortar Store
We recently shared some examples of how Enterprise IoT (Internet of Things) may have an enormous impact of retail store sales. My son was just sharing a news story with me on retail that pointed some fairly bleak statistics regarding the opening and closing of retail stores.
While the gap of closures continues to increase, it’s important to recognize that this country continues to open more and more retail outlets. Even Amazon, the so-called retail killer, is working with retailers and opening its own stores. Why? Customer experience. The fact is that American consumers still want to both touch the products they’re buying as well as leave the store with them – and you can only get that with a retail outlet.
Contrary to most opinions, brick-and-mortar stores still exist and are not going anywhere anytime soon. No, this is not an emotional narrative that’s conveniently ignoring the reality, but it’s a reflection of what consumers think and how the traditional (offline) retail market has been performing in the past few years, despite the presence of online retail stores growing every year. Rutgers University
Estimates for 2018 still project over 91.2% of all sales will happen in a retail store, leaving just 8.8% of sales occurring online
This infographic was created by Rutgers University’s Online Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration program, and illustrates the statistics and how retail stores are adapting with improved customer service, customer experience, mobile technology, mixed reality, and store ambience. You may already see the transformation happening, where stores look much more like showrooms than storerooms.
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