The rise of e-commerce has triggered rapid development and transformation in offline retail to combat this challenge. Many brick-and-mortar retail formats have been transformed to enhance interaction, engagement and the emotional return of the experience, showing that there is still a role here. While the traditional way of shopping will always exist, the pandemic has brought about some radical changes in the way consumers want to shop today. The past two years have seen a phenomenal increase in online shopping as the pandemic has prevented people from going shopping. Now that the fear of Covid is waning and the country is opening up, the freedom to shop has given consumers a positive outlook to shop freely at their leisure.
Brands are also very excited about online shopping and are gearing up to meet the demand for this festive season. With the changes in the behavior of today’s consumers, would we see a return of high traffic to malls and retail stores? During this year’s Independence Day, we saw special offers from brands during the long weekend driving huge footfall to most malls, which saw brisk sales.
Some top brands, especially in the automotive, consumer electronics, FMCG and retail sectors, are increasing their budgets this holiday season. Some of the retail outlets like Croma and Vijay Sales have already strengthened their sales teams as they look forward to a boom period after two years of lull. Leading e-commerce players like Amazon, Flipkart and Tata Cliq have already started wooing customers with aggressive offers and campaigns.
New digital channels and touchpoints are expanding rapidly. Leading brands are moving from multichannel to omnichannel and finally to converged commerce. Converged commerce is driving retailers and brands to create ecosystems to better serve channel-agnostic customers with their own commerce ecosystems. India is not far from this as heavy investments are being pumped in to expand the market for consumers to enjoy a great shopping experience both on the technology front and the availability of a wide range of products and services.
This holiday season saw us witness a war between online shopping and brick-and-mortar shopping. Given the rapid digitization and good consumer experience of shoppers over the past two years, brands will continue to improve the online experience and strengthen their operations and their logistics and delivery to keep all customers happy. Brands need to catch up over the last two years to make all efforts both online and offline so that customers have plenty of options with attractive pricing and schemes.
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