Retailers Reinventing The Store

During recession times, retailers always keep searching for new ways to keep the clients to come back to their stores. Some of the new trends in pulling traffic to the stores and enabling them to expand into new categories with attractive margins are:

1. Site and Store Integration
Retailers will continue to feature high-rotation products in-store, but they will also increasingly offer additional SKUs online, without taking on the additional cost and risk of stocking products in-store.

2. Automated Retail
As the online categories continues to grow, retailers will deploy more self-service technology that enables shoppers to select, buy, and check-out.

3. Prepared and Ready-to-Heat Food
The goal is to drive trips and increase average basket sizes, prepared food in particular, whether it be ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat. Consumers like the idea of shifting the meal preparation from the shopper to the retailer.

4. Instructional/Educational Space
Retailers are trying to help their shoppers learn and get the most value from the products they buy.
By offering in-store classes, retailers can attract a shopper base to spend more time in-store while building brand loyalty.

5. Interactive Space
The Apple stores style and approach. Laying products out in a more attractive environment and let shoppers trial them.

6. Retailtainment
Another way to get shoppers in the store is offering entertaining shopping experience. This is something that retailers like Disney know very well. Creating a destination that’s entertaining to visit will remain a key strategy.

7. Services
Brick-and-mortar stores need to master one of two things in order to win–being low price or being differentiated. One way to differentiate is to offer a unique set of services in-store. The right services will drive incremental trips, increase loyalty, and higher annual spend.

8. Showroom
E-commerce and price comparison apps are turning some retailers into showrooms. Some retailers will embrace this and convert their space or open new formats to take advantage of it.
These showrooms will have little or no inventory and will offer options for ordering and delivering to home and the store.

9. Social Space
Providing social space in the store will become more popular. By having places for people to just hang out–bars, restaurants, coffee shops–retailers can get shoppers to spend more time in their stores.

10. Store-Within-a-Store
Renting space to trip-driving brands within big box stores is likely to become extremely popular over the next few years. Look for retailers to take a highly rotational/seasonal approach with these mini-stores and focus on showcasing innovation.

Source: http://retailnetgroup.com/