Stores Have Themselves To Blame For ‘Showrooming’

In How Can Organized Retailers Respond To Showrooming?, I’d written about “showrooming”, the new shopping behavior in which consumers use a physical store as a showroom to touch and feel a product but ultimately buy it from an online competitor – often at a lower price. Although showrooming hasn’t yet become mainstream, it’s bound to gain … Read more

How Can Organized Retailers Respond To Showrooming?

‘Showrooming’ is being projected as a new threat posed by e-commerce websites to organized retailers’ brick-and-mortar stores. Showrooming can be defined best as “the consumer practice of using a retailer’s stores as a show room, to look, touch, and feel (not to mention partake of the retailer’s employee expertise, such that it might be), but … Read more

Discount Is Not The Only Reason For Shopping Online

At the end of my blog post titled Retail Is Still Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce, I’d made a bold prediction that, within a few months, I’d find a few more non-price related reasons for shopping online. Well, it took me longer than that but I found one recently. This was at the outlet … Read more

Retail Is Still Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce

In Retail Is Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce, I’d listed three reasons why I’ve increasingly turned to ecommerce for my shopping needs. As you might recall, none of them was related to price. In the recent past, there were two more reasons why I went online. Money Back Guarantee I recently bought a car charger … Read more

Retail Is Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce

Although I had my first taste of ecommerce as far back as 1998, over the years I’ve preferred to shop at brick-and-mortar stores – at least in India – because the offline channel shields me from the intrinsic delivery risk of the marketplace model and saves me the friction of transacting online with credit cards. … Read more

Omnichannel Fiasco #1: Standard Chartered Credit Card

I recently went through two omnichannel experiences, one that started well but went downhill thereafter, and another that was a disaster right from the beginning. Before I deep dive into my experiences, here’s a quick working definition of omnichannel: Omnichannel is where a single business process is deliberately split across multiple channels so that each … Read more