Keeping the wheels on the shopping cart.
By: Sai Krishna V. K
Tags: Covid 19, Augmented Reality, Ecommerce, Coronavirus, Retail

Keeping the wheels on the shopping cart.

These are tough times if you are a retailer, store or offline brand. the retail community is one of the sectors being hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic. As retailers try to figure out how to navigate these uncertain times, we’re here to help, in our little way. Sai Krishna V. K Follow Apr 6, 2020 · 13 min read

Things are a bit concerning out there

I hope this note finds you, your team and your loved ones as we all settle into the new normal — at least for the foreseeable future. These times are concerning, uncertain and has no playbook written to adhere to. Honestly, we don’t know how long this is going to last, and what the world would look like once it has. Hence, we’re penning this as our lens to view the world from your shoes, the same ones that make up ours.

Not one, but three Crises

While the world at large feels the weight in the midst of the Covid crisis, in the retail & commerce space, we deal with the overlap of not one but three crises. The three crises are (1) a health crisis (Covid-19) that has generated a (2) financial crisis, each of which has generated massive societal disruption which will generate a (3) mental health crisis for us all operating our businesses.

In addition, these are both localized (in a community), at a state level, a national level, and a global level. I write this from a country where nearly 2 billion people are under a nation-wide lock-down and curfew. our partners are across the world spanning some of the worst hit regions such as Madrid, New York and London. This is not just going to “be over.” That’s magical thinking. There will be many different phases of this, but if you prepare for a long-term experience, you’ll be in a much healthier place. Here’s what we’re seeing in the chasm:

Businesses thrive on clarity: This shut down was sudden by all yardsticks. In-person meetings couldn’t happen. “Done deal” things were no longer done deals. Term sheets for startups were being rescinded and almost everybody made sure to revisit what force majeure meant.

But the most resilient, forward thinking companies have already started to respond. Instead of saying “come visit our storeroom when it reopens,” they’re building a digital equivalent of their own stores. This isn’t just an eCommerce listing, but the entire storefront experience taken online, from every option, customization and detail that you might want as a customer, because if you think a business thrives on clarity, the customer wants it now more than ever.

The north star is sales, and just sales: When everything is skittish, rely on sales to do the stabilizing. We’re seeing some companies and customers set up entire response teams to help further drive sales. The best ones are using this opportunity to seize the moment to build relationships with strategic accounts and win new customer segments. Most effectively though, we’re seeing customers make it easy to digitally discover “See-Try-Buy” products online and to enable their distributors to offer the same experience to drive sales too.

Things are tight: This is not an easy time for most businesses, especially if you have a retail storefront. For some, it might make sense to lower marketing costs. For others, it means getting more out of the resources you have like equipping sales with better technology and to sell remotely. We know every bit counts right now and over the next week, and we got down to trying to build something out to help every business that can do with an extra pair of hands.

In times like this, we believe more than ever that growth and adaptation in business is the key to success. One thing is certain, people are indoors and that is a whole new opportunity for you.

The couch is the new window wonderland.

Your customers are all in their homes, and this changes how they shop, and perhaps what they shop for too. At Scapic, we started by looking at this big picture. We always start from what we know. First, this is an opportunity to learn — a rare occasion where we’ve had to institute massive behavioral change, seemingly overnight. Such a shift, whilst uncomfortable, will reveal a lot about our society’s capacity to adapt to new behaviors, as well as each individual’s response to those changes. A big part of this response is commerce, and herein marks an inflection point in retail and for better or for worse, things will never quite go back to the way they were before.

eComm’s growth has been steady over the past 10 years, but it has never supplanted in-store shopping.

Overall, some 51 percent prefer to shop online, while the remaining 49 percent would rather go to a store

E-commerce is growing 3 times faster than traditional retail, with a growth rate of about 15 percent compared to 5 percent growth for brick and mortar stores

However…

People spend 64 percent of their shopping cash in stores, compared with 36 percent online

In other words, there hasn’t been a watershed moment where consumers gave themselves permission to buy “anything and everything” online. They’ve never been forced to, and old habits die hard.

Here are the revenue trends by vertical:

The following charts are provided from anonymized data from Attentive. Data is provided as of end of the day on Wednesday, March 25, 2020