Introduction
Internet retailers tend to believe that consumers who do online shopping are not interested in the physical stores but even younger generations prefer to buy their products in physical shops. Of course, online shopping is easier and more convenient but online shoppers like to see what they are buying from a physical store. Therefore, ecommerce businesses have lately started establishing physical stores for their products and this is what is commonly referred to as brick and click ecommerce. Customers like to touch the merchandise as much as they like to see it online. More so, customers’ value shopping as a form of social activity, which is a form of entertainment that cannot be imitated in an online setting. For this reason, ecommerce businesses have started adopted a multichannel strategy that allows them to open carefully designed showrooms, a new trend known as brick and click.
Facts about brick and click retailers
Buying and selling of products has never been easier. Brick and click retailing allows consumers to shop online through their phones and laptops either from home or at work among other places of their convenience. Similarly, if they want to experience a physical touch of the product, they have the option of visiting a real store. Brick and click retailing gives a retailer the advantage of offering both of these services to his/ her customers. In fact, multichannel retailing and shopping has become very common in most product categories in the world today and it has helped retailers reach more customers segments while at the same time creating synergies for their online stores with the physical stores acting as billboards for the entire brand (Herhausen, Binder, Schoegel & Herrmann, 2015). This strategy has also created catalogues for the retailers, which provide reminders to the consumers to buy their products through the internet.
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Therefore, the best online retailers on the world have embarked on understanding both the positive and negative effects of multichannel shopping and retailing in order to find better ways of responding to changes in sales of existing channels when new ones are added. They are also focused on rethinking about shopping experience for the customers. Brick and click has been by far the best trend for online retailers in the last few years due to its abilities to satisfy customer needs satisfactorily.
Performance of Macy’s online channel
Macy’s, being the largest US department store chain, has realized that the internet has changed the way people shop and it has been very dedicated to rethink its customers shopping experience. By doing this, Macy’s has been increasing its sales consistently since 2009 despite the continuous decrease in store sales (Oh, Teo & Sambamurthy, 2012) . It experienced challenges when it first tried to adapt ecommerce since it was among the first retailers to try online marketing. However, its digital transformation succeeded when it announced adoption of a holistic multichannel strategy towards spanning its business operations and workforce. This strategy helped Macy’s catch a grip on an integrated consumer experience. This online channel gave Macy’s a chance to add value to its customers five times more than its single channel counterparts did. This led to a consistent increase in its online sales since 2012 thus gaining a competitive advantage in the market (Oh, Teo & Sambamurthy, 2012) .
How Macy’s can better manage its brick and click retailing
Like any other retail store, Macy’s can do a better job in managing both its online and offline stores by using a multichannel digital transformation distribution concept to cut on costs. This concept helps retailers position their store networks as online order distribution centers and then train employees how to digitally integrate selling with customer service experience. Consequently, Macy’s could use digital transformation to optimize its logistics while at the same time utilizing its physical stores across the world (Oh, Teo & Sambamurthy, 2012). This concept is known as store distribution and it help bring customers to the stores.
Conclusion
Bearing in mind that consumer shopping behavior and technological trends are changing every day in the retailing world, Macy’s should always keep an eye for the next creative idea that might lead to innovation thus setting it apart from its competitors. The company competes with giant retail stores such as Amazon and Wal-Mart and it should look out for the best chances of doing something outstanding in order to gain an advantage over them.
References
Herhausen, D., Binder, J., Schoegel, M., & Herrmann, A. (2015). Integrating bricks with clicks: retailer-level and channel-level outcomes of online–offline channel integration. Journal of retailing , 91 (2), 309-325.
Oh, L. B., Teo, H. H., & Sambamurthy, V. (2012). The effects of retail channel integration through the use of information technologies on firm performance. Journal of Operations Management , 30 (5), 368-381 .
