Top 7 Evolving Retail Realty & Its Impact of on Us……

The retail industry is transforming, and its changes are unprecedented. It is affecting the fabric of the society, whether its age, gender, buying behavior, generation, and many more areas.

Transaction-based systems are evolving to provide experience to the customer. Customers are no longer depending on physical wallet or cash. With Amazon Go kind of store, one can purchase without even waiting at a billing counter. Just pick up and walk out of the store and money gets deducted automatically from the card and the bill gets delivered to your app.

Whether it's buying buttons or the Alexa ordering system now, any age group can just use their touch or voice to order any product they want to get delivered to the doorstep. That’s a blessing in countries where there is a rise in the aged population. Certainly, that’s a miracle for elderly people as they neither have to operate mobile apps or website nor they depend on others.

During the pandemic, many including myself got saved by the online players by getting grocer delivered at home. That’s indeed shaken one of the big and critical pillars of retail “Place”. If you ask any brick and mortar players, the most important “P” out of 4Ps, they all say location (Place). Now it's not that critical, as many budding entrepreneurs succeeded during pandemic without having a physical store of their own.

Gen- Z they born with a cellphone in their hand. I mean for them, many things which we saw in our lifetime are antique. Well, they also grew by hearing sustainability lectures. Well, to be very honest, it's a curse from their predecessor, who destroyed the balance of the ecosystem, and now there are efforts are going on to stitch it. So, Gen-Z wants to use more sustainable products and retailers are putting efforts to bring that visibility to them. One who succeeds in it becomes loyal to this group of buyers.

Well, gamification in retail soon becomes the new reality across all e-commerce players. As people are avoiding come out of home, they need to get entertained. As per reports, there is a jump in Netflix subscriptions and online games. So, retailers who are going to combine games with purchase experience sure going to get more visitors vs those who haven’t.

Personalization, now accuracy of it surely going to boom. As Pandemic lockdowns gave e-commerce players a key to enter your bedroom. Well, not literally, I meant figuratively–How? Before lockdown, customers were flirting with online players as they sometimes buy online and sometimes offline. Now lockdown made you loyal to online players and gave their entire focus to them. Well, in return e-commerce players know your likes and dislikes.

Convenience, commerce players figured it out well by coming closer to the customer. Many biggies are making symbiotic relations with kirana's (convenience stores) to deliver day-to-day products such as grocers and vegetables. By doing so, their thin margin in these categories is not eroding and kirana's are getting additional benefits through various schemes by these players.

In short, days of pure-play brick and mortar retail are going down well that doesn’t mean e-commerce players are rising. It would be better to say middle path–I mean omnichannel retail or well-strategized retailers are going to survive in the next decade. I am not saying digitized or tech-savvy and all that jargon; I know you would have read it in many places.

Best strategic retailers are going to win the race, of course, the tech will play a major role. Gauge your need before you engage anyone to transform your retail business 😊