We are almost to the end of the holiday shopping frenzy that begins on Black Friday and really doesn’t end until the New Year sales are exhausted. Retail Technology Insider is taking a moment to relax with a hot cup of cocoa and a look back at recent stories that highlight how retail has changed. While malls are continuing to close, e-tail and luxury brands are experiencing robust sales, so it isn’t all doom and gloom for the sector. Learn which parts of the retail industry are thriving and why some are not in this roundup of recent stories:
The Rise Of The Ghost Mall
Christmas shopping today is very different from a decade ago, when families would head to the mall and spend a day going from store to store to shop for gifts. Retail in general just isn’t the same as it used to be, and ghost malls – the hollowed shell of a once bustling retail center – are becoming commonplace across America. According to The Atlantic, a recession might be to blame for the demise of malls, but a rising GDP, low gas prices, and low unemployment say otherwise. Instead, the change is us. We prefer e-commerce over malls, experience over price, and convenience over anything. “The emergence of e-commerce changed the game. As hybrid commerce has picked up steam in the last five years or so, the question now isn’t how many stores can I put in the market, but, rather, it is what is the right number of stores needed in the market to support an omnichannel strategy?” said Bill McKeogh, a location analytics and data expert with Pitney Bowes. Read the article here.
Luxury Brand Sales Defy Retail Industry Trends And Are Projected To Triple By 2025
The retail sector has had its fair share of woes lately with iconic brands filing for bankruptcy and others working hard to find a new strategy to preserve their market share. However, there is one sector of the retail industry that is bucking those trends – luxury brands. Luxury brands have done an exemplary job of engaging customers, both online and offline, by putting what they know about their customers to work. By using customer insight, they can offer customers the type of engagement and experience that resonates and builds loyalty at a time when consumers have been seen as fickle. “As retailers adopt this customer-centric approach it enables them to build their bottom line by focusing less on which category is selling and more on what the customer is buying,” said Andy Reid, Global Head of Retail at Pitney Bowes. To explore this topic, Retail Technology Insider has compiled the top stories on evolving luxury retail. Read more here.
7 Amazon-Obsessed Retail Predictions For 2019
While Amazon is expected to have generated $258.22 billion in U.S. retail sales in 2018, predictions for next year have multichannel retailers, such as Target, Walmart, and Costco, starting to close the digital consumer-experience gap with the online retail behemoth. They’ll do it by offering services such as one-day shipping, mobile engagement, and subscription product business models, according to Dan Druker, chief marketing officer for digital experience management platform firm Instart. Another goal is to replicate the “fandom” and “droves of sticky Amazon groupies” that are the 100-million+ Prime members around the world. According to research, retailers are spending lots of money to retain the customers who have been shopping with them anyway — and most don’t take advantage of it. What paid membership does is turn short-lived loyalty into something deeper and more committed, and retailers such as Lululemon, Sephora and Restoration Hardware already are creating their own spins on paid-membership perks. Read the article here.
