Showing posts with label retail insights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retail insights. Show all posts

Saturday, June 28, 2014

The "gross margin negative business model".

The recent article in ET on "How success of e-commerce start-ups are making traditional retailers rethink their model" was interesting reading, however, what was more interesting was the view of Mr. Biyani. On this one (the two points he makes) I agree with him.

The darling of everybody at this point in time is "the great ecom experience", however, the business viability & margins on transactions are the elephants in the room that are getting ignored. The gross margin negative businesses are not sustainable and are completely dependent on the VC funds for survival - a fact validated by a number of business leaders who were unable to raise a 2nd or a 3rd round and ended up shutting the once 'viable ecom' business.

Another article worth reading on the subject is Issues with Inventory models .  

Looking forward to see how the category progresses and the models that will finally sustain.  


Saturday, July 14, 2012

The future of shopping.

Came across this wonderful article on HBR which talks about how every 50 years or so, retailing undergoes a kind of disruption. 

A century and a half ago, the growth of big cities and the rise of railroad networks made possible the modern department store. Mass-produced automobiles came along 50 years later, and soon shopping malls lined with specialty retailers were dotting the newly forming suburbs and challenging the city-based department stores.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the spread of discount chains—Walmart, Kmart, and the like—and, soon after, big-box “category killers” such as Circuit City and Home Depot, all of them undermining or transforming the old-style mall. 


 Like most disruptions, digital retail technology got off to a shaky start. A bevy of internet-based retailers in the 1990s—Amazon.com, Pets.com, and pretty much everythingelse.com—embraced what they called online shopping or electronic commerce. These fledgling companies ran wild until a combination of ill-conceived strategies, speculative gambles, and a slowing economy burst the dot-com bubble. The ensuing collapse wiped out half of all e commerce retailers and provoked an abrupt shift from irrational exuberance to economic reality.

Today, however, that economic reality is well established. The research firm Forrester estimates that e-commerce is now approaching $200 billion in revenue in the United States alone and accounts for 9% of total retail sales, up from 5% five years ago. The corresponding figure is about 10% in the United Kingdom, 3% in Asia-Pacific, and 2% in Latin America. Globally, digital retailing is probably headed toward 15% to 20% of total sales, though the proportion will vary significantly by sector. Moreover, much digital retailing is now highly profitable. Amazon’s five-year average return on investment, for example, is 17%, whereas traditional discount and department stores average 6.5%.

What we are seeing today is only the beginning. Soon it will be hard even to define e-commerce, let alone measure it. Is it an e-commerce sale if the customer goes to a store, finds that the product is out of stock, and uses an in-store terminal to have another location ship it to her home? What if the customer is shopping in one store, uses his smartphone to find a lower price at another, and then orders it electronically for in-store pickup? How about gifts that are ordered from a website but exchanged at a local store? Experts estimate that digital information already influences about 50% of store sales, and that number is growing rapidly.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Flight From Conversation.

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at M.I.T wrote this wonderful article in the NYT where she says that we’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. 

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The Story of Unstoring.

The enD of The ShoP AS We KnoW iT !

One of the first products to be sold on the Internet was a pizza. That was in 1994 and the provider was an international restaurant chain called Pizza Hut. One year later Jeff Bezos took up the idea of online retailing. He started by selling books online on amazon. com. The sales channel faced a wall of scepticism. Who in the world would order books online when they could buy them in a shop? Fifteen years later the answer is clear: lots of people, and more every day. A comparatively young trio of Apple, Google and Amazon are in the process of forcing 500 years of printing and its distribution channels to adopt new business models. This development is already in full swing in the music industry and has the potential to turn conventional retail upside down. The triumphal advance of the Internet and e-commerce is changing the way in which the world gets its information, exchanges views and ideas, and shops. There is no sign that this momentum is about to change. The launch of user-friendly Internet browsers in the mid-1990s triggered the race for ever cheaper and more powerful terminals; since then, the story of retailing has been an ongoing process of steady revision. Bypassing the shop.

Unstoring denotes a development that short-circuits the classic retailer. It is a future that could render shops superfluous – if they refuse to change. The reality is that digital technologies are increasingly part of the real world. The clear distinction between online and offline, between virtual and real, is blurring as the two universes merge. But what will happen to conventional shops when more people use the (virtual) pixel shopping cart than the conventional (real) wire cart? When sales migrate off the retail floor, it is time to reinvent the retail store.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Retailing in the Recession - a playbook.

Just got this whitepaper from WPP's retail knowledge initiative - The Store titled "Retailing in the Recession". This is the 1st in a series of "playbooks" to help retailers and brand owners succeed in today’s unpredictable climate. I believe you will find this insightful although it does tend to address the US market trends - however, a number of them are applicable for Asia as well.

I have linked it here for a free download, although you will need to register on the site to access the document. When on the site, also check out the demos of the last mile effectiveness measurement tools.