There’s been a great deal written and said in recent years about the death of the high street. Conventional wisdom dictates that shoppers are more and more turning to dedicated retail parks and to the internet for everything from pet food to personal computers.
It’s true that the UK Office of National Statistics figures for March 2020 showed that a record high of 22.3% for online purchases. But savvy retailers are more and more realising that there is still plenty of potential for the traditional outlet, albeit backed up by a complementary online service too.
Choose your sector
The key to success for anyone considering a retail business, unsurprisingly, is to think long and hard about which sector will be most profitable. These do exist and the troubles that some of the bigger businesses in recent years may well have presented a number of unexpected opportunities.
A good example of this comes from the food sector. With growing concern about packaging and its effect on the environment, supermarket chains have been forced very much on to the back foot, constantly having to play up their environmental credentials.
But this has also given rise to the appearance of the kind of shop that many of our grandparents, and even great-grandparents, would have been familiar with. Ones where you take your own containers and only buy the staples that you need. On a slightly more contemporary note, many of the bigger bookmaking businesses have been closing down branches, potentially creating a situation in which new, smaller operations could thrive.
Online is important
But, and it’s a big but, for this to happen for both of these examples, it needs to be backed up by an online presence too. After all, in the case of the latter, it’s the growth of online betting that has been cited as one of the key causes for the traditional bookmakers’ decline so enabling customers to interact in this way too is an obvious move.
Fortunately, there are a number of suppliers who can both cater for retail and iGaming solutions. These can connect offline to online operations to work in unison and can be scaled up as the size of the business expands or moves into other areas of iGaming. Furthermore, bespoke solutions can resolve specific issues or offer further customisation for niche industries, and an advantage of it being online is that it offers support all year without exception. Looking at the case of our food shop example, it’s more a case of having an accompanying eCommerce site set up either for deliveries or for click and collect services for customers.
A special synergy
By creating retail and an online presence it adds up to far more than a sum of the respective elements. Each acts to support the other element in terms of everything from creating a strong brand to helping to maximise visibility. Naturally, it also gives customers double the opportunity to interact, in the way that is most convenient for them at the time.
So if you are weighing up your next business move, this delicate balance between a physical and an online presence is one to consider carefully. But get it right and the odds of success will be heavily stacked in your favour.
