Tag: brick and mortar

How Retailers Are Fighting Showrooming With Digital Price Tags

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Showrooming refers to the popular practice of consumers visiting retail stores in order to examine an item before buying it online instead, and it is hurting the bottom line of many brick-and-mortar retailers. Lower prices offered by online sellers is a primary reason for showrooming, and that’s why some big-name retail brands, such as Sears, Kohl’s, and Home Depot, are installing digital shelf displays, which allow for real-time adjustment of product prices, at select stores in order to match the low prices shoppers find online.

What Brands Need To Do
While it may be an effective way for physical stores to compete with online marketplaces such as Amazon, it is in fact a rather pricey solution, as digitizing all price tags in one single store could reportedly cost up to six figures. In order to better combat showrooming, retailers need to think about more ways to incorporate their digital assets into physical stores, like what Rebecca Minkoff did, or figure out ways to convert customers to webrooming, which entails product research online before in-store purchase.

 

Source: Bloomberg Business

 

How Macy’s Digitalized Its Flagship Store To Lure Millennial Shoppers

Posted on by Richard Yao

What Happened
Last week, Macy’s unveiled “One Below,” a space designed to court the digitally connected millennial shopper. Located in the basement level of its flagship store in New York’s Herald Square, the space boasts an array of brands that appeal to the generation and has technology as its focal point. It features an interactive touchscreen named “Instagram Wall,” showcasing photos tagged with #Macyslove, and a “Selfie Wall,” which allows shoppers to take a selfie with Macy’s branded images of NYC as backgrounds, in addition to a wearable-tech section, a 3-D printing area, and DIY stations with brands such as Fossil and Levi’s.

What Brands Need To Do
With the rise of ecommerce, brick-and-mortar retailers are facing increasing challenges from the digital stores. And with sales growth slowing down and its average customer age pushing 50, it seems like a logical move for Macy’s to aggressively go after the millennial shoppers with social sharing tools like Instagram Wall and DIY personalization experiences. For brands that own brick-and-mortar retail stores, now is time to embrace the in-store digital installations so as to provide young customers with a fresh, exciting shopping experience that they would love to return to.

 

Source: Digiday

 

Why Amazon Launched A New Pinterest-Inspired Retail Curation

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Next Web

Today Amazon launched a curated product page named Amazon Stream which, with a visual repository of daily updated products and a conspicuous “Save” button, took some clear inspiration from Pinterest. Currently, all items featured in Stream are part of the “Amazon’s Sponsored Products” program.

The ecommerce giant has two obvious reasons for experimenting with the new layout. Firstly, Stream offers a new platform to showcase the sponsored products, therefore adding more value to its sponsored ad program. More importantly, Stream transforms the conventional “search-led” online shopping experience into a more “browsing-led” experience that is closer to brick-and-mortar retail experience.

As ecommerce continues to erode physical retail sales, online retailers have also been experimenting with new formats and designs to improve user experience. For more, you can click here to read our POV on “Shoppable Media” to learn how leading ecommerce brands like Amazon are integrating points of sale to create a consistent customer experience across platforms.

 

Head image screen-cap’ed from www.amazon.com/stream

 

EE Aids Retailers With Digital Connectivity

Posted on by Lab Team

When most marketers and brands talk about harnessing the power of the Internet in-store, you’re often likely to hear plans to target consumers, or to remake the shopping experience for the average person. EE, a UK mobile operator, is turning this notion on its head with its service called Connected Retail. Offered to shops in the UK, the program aims to help brick and mortar establishments compete with online shopping by, in part, cutting down on long lines in-store. According to the company’s data, retailers lose millions in revenue each year to long lines and impatient customers who would rather shop online – 73% of customers said they would abandon their purchases if they had to wait for more than 5 minutes in line. To help, EE offers retailers a combination of heat-mapping technology so that stores can anticipate and react to lines before they form, in-store Wifi to connect staff and customers, and send customers personalized offers and promotions via their smartphones. Such a full-service model could become common if successful, and points to a potentially fruitful way forward for technology in aiding the shopping experience 

InfoScout.co Brings Detailed Purchase Data to Brands

Posted on by Lab Team

I’m shocked that it took me so long to realize that Box Tops for Education was a consumer research program.  Brands have clamored for decades to determine who they should be marketing to, but the only hard data consistently available to them is the store and time of day a specific product was purchased at, and efforts like Box Tops required a burdensome consumer action.  InfoScout.co recently launched to solve this problem, rewarding consumers for photographing their receipts and completing surveys about themselves, in turn giving brands a full view of who is buying their products, where, when, and how.  The details recorded include useful metrics: payment method, store type, other products purchased at the same time.  This simple solution could dramatically affect the marketing operations of major consumer packaged goods companies by giving them a 360 degree view of their place in the market and in relation to what may in some cases seem like unrelated products.

Nordstrom Highlights Product Popularity With Pinterest

Posted on by Lab Team

Many restaurants use Yelp or Zagat stickers as validations of their quality – displaying reviews on their windows functions as social evidence for customers looking for a dinner. Nordstrom is hoping that they can create an equivalent system for retail commerce via Pinterest. The store is tagging some of its most pinned items with the Pinterest logo in-store. It’s a way of telling customers that people want the product, as well as a way of indexing its digital popularity. The company has posted photos and instagrams of the experiment; so far its only in select stores, but it will be interesting to hear from customers in the near future whether or not they are more likely to purchase a Pinterest-tagged item. 

STORY Shifts Retail Concepts

Posted on by Lab Team

In her talk at the PSFK Conference, Rachel Shechtman described what she termed ‘Retail Media’ with respect to he Brick and Mortar ‘experience,’ STORY. The multi-media concept combines curation and editorial content with more traditional retail structures. Most simply, Shechtman curates her physical locations much like a magazine that changes themes and covers every four to eight weeks. In the same way, Shechtman tells a different STORY in a different location, with a new theme, and ultimately, new products in the same production cycle. This offers a discovery platform combined with content, commerce, and community, that revolves around a physical entity. Recent variations and space utilizations have included Wellness, Color, Making Things, and Art. And ultimately, the consumer doesn’t know what will be next, so they’re constantly enticed back a few weeks later to experience the next story.

Content not available.
Please enable ADDITIONAL COOKIES from settings

Kate Spade’s Aggressive In-store iPad Integration

Posted on by Lab Team

In a world where shoppers can access limitless inventory and product information, Kate Spade needed to give shoppers a reason to come in-store.  In response, the luxury retailers swapped out paper signs for iPads that display pricing and promotional information in select Tokyo locations. Beyond traditional displays, Kate Spade has incorporated product demos, inventory management, sharing functionality and more all geared at increasing dwell time in stores.