E-Com

Global Retail Best Practice – 100 Ideas from around the world

The likes of Amazon and Alibaba opened tech-heavy brick & mortar stores, but best practice commercial brand retail still lives elsewhere.

Sales reports of industry show that recent years were good for large parts of the lifestyle brand industry. Almost 4/5 of the top 100 European and US American lifestyle brands had a growth year, and for the most part did better than the year before. This was despite a global department store fallout and online growth and was largely based e.com and store growth.

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Brick & Mortar is the new Online: E-commerce Trends 2019

Amazon just released sales numbers for 2018 and the details indicate that the mother of all e-commerce is confronted with new growth realities.

And Amazon is not the only one.

  • GLORE, the stock index for global online retailers stayed far behind old economy stocks.
  • E-commerce became ‘weather sensitive’, had bankruptcies and major players missed sales forecasts by far.
  • Almost all online pure players are working on brick & mortar concepts, already leading to over 20 stores in Berlin.

So let’s look at the fundamentals behind the e-commerce trends 2019 that indicate a new direction in growth.

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Customer Acquisition Online: Challenges and Opportunities for Brands

Building a successful e-commerce business requires a strong online customer acquisition strategy, especially when the competition are big platforms like Amazon or Zalando. How can brands leverage their strengths to compete?

A brands’ ability to operate a successful e-commerce business clears the path to bigger margins and critical access to customer acquisition insights compared to wholesale channels. If you are an executive working for a ‘traditional’ fashion brand and want to better understand the marketing of your online store, ask your e-commerce director this simple question:

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Empowering Shoppers and Brands: The Latest Trends in Online Fashion Retail

Fashion shoppers and brands demand more than monotonous ‘scroll and buy’ experiences. New trends are already redefining online fashion retail, are you following them?

Shopping for fashion online has become widespread, especially for millennials who now buy 20% of their clothing on the internet, according to WWD.

And the big online retailers, led by Amazon, deserve credit for having found ways to offer reliable and trustworthy shopping experiences with easy and secure payments, flexible deliveries and often free returns. By establishing this trust in the online shopping process, a big milestone has been reached that allows online fashion retail to leave its infancy. (more…)

Amazon on the Road to Omnichannel Retail Success?

While most brands and retailers are building and expanding their online stores, Amazon is investing in brick & mortar: a surprising update on Amazon’s omnichannel retail status.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re running a billion-dollar brand. Last year’s net expansion of stores was negative (not counting a recent acquisition) and your share in online sales remains below 5%. Can you already feel how analysts and journalists rip you to shreds over your unconvincing omnichannel retailing?

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Size Matters! 4 High and Low Tech Solutions for Fashion Size Finding

Fashion size finding remains a challenge for retailers and consumers. Choose the right fit for you from our shortlist of size finding technologies.

Finding the right size is of course crucial when shopping for fashion. It is therefore no big surprise that failing to find the correct size or fit is the reason that consumers mention most frequently for aborting a shopping experience, both online and in brick and mortar stores.

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Top Sporting Goods Brands Not Fit for Cross Channel Experience

Most brands are pretty bad at cross channel experience, says the New Milliennial. That was what my father and I wanted to verify during a recent online-offline retail study tour in London.

Asics, Adidas, New Balance, Nike, and Puma were our main brands of interest. To assess their cross channel services thoroughly my father and I went on research for best practices at a wide range of brands and retailers.

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1000 Myths, 60 Locations & 5 Formats – The Facts about the Amazon Retail Strategy

Amid many myths and rumors, this research sheds light on the facts, corporate communication, and the evidence from physical store openings. Long quality read.

Imagine you own 43% of your online market, and 50% of the online growth, but 85% of your market continues to be brick & mortar? Imagine (more…)

The Amazon Book Store – Zero Cross Channel Services and Other Surprises

A retail pro audit from Amazon’s brick & mortar book store in Seattle, a consumer experience with zero cross channel services. Only an app secured the sale.

I have to admit, I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon. As a consumer, I like their ultimate convenience for need shopping, yet find their attempts at inspiring my impulse shopping utterly over the top. As a brand and retail manager, I love them for (more…)

Brand Distribution via Digital Marketplaces – What Business Model is Right for You?

Brand distribution via digital marketplaces requires new skills and systems. This post argues that you need to be clear about your digital B2C readiness to decide how to best execute.

In my last post, I shared some facts on the importance of marketplaces. This time let me talk about HOW to do your business via digital marketplaces right.

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How to Balance Digital Brand Distribution: Learn from the Bricks-&-Mortar World

Digital brand distribution has huge sales potential, but brands miss out on the growth opportunity. This article outlines how to achieve successful growth.

Internet marketplaces are the digital version of High Street shopping areas, but with increasing ‘footfall’.  The Ecommerce Foundation estimates that by 2020, up to 40% of all online purchases will made via marketplaces. Can you afford to ignore 40% of the online market? (Ecommerce Foundation, 2015)

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Multichannel Growth: Wholesale is our Favourite

Multichannel growth is the brand growth strategy of the century. We are creating a scenario where wholesale will experience a revival in 2020.

Multichannel growth has been the daily business of brands since the 1990s. In fact, multichannel competence was the key success factor for many best-practice growing lifestyle brands. But the term ‘multichannel’ became common when internet distribution entered the scene.

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