This Is a Summary of the Article, “the Future of Shopping” by Darell Rigby.

This is a summary of the article, “the Future of shopping” by Darell Rigby.

Darell Rigby believes that omnichannel retailing is the future for all retailers. Omni-Channel Retailing is the evolution of retailing that is concentrated on a more seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available shopping channels. These channels create an experience for the costumers. Omnichannel retailing will bring costumers a lot more information, prices are easily compared and people can shop everywhere.

Almost every 50 years there has been a big change in retail. Just about 150 years ago it started with the growth of big cities and the rise of railroad networks which made the modern department store possible. Mass produced cars came 50 years later together with shopping malls, specialty retailers and suburbs. From around 1960 the large discount stores came such as Wal-Mart and Circuit City. Over the years the old way of retailing didn’t disappear, but it changed the way retailers thought and act together with the expectations of customers.

Like every change, ups and downs were normal. In the 90’s, a lot of retailers started online shopping. A combination of terrible strategies, bad speculations on the exchange market and a slow economy made it all collapse. The online market is stable and growing now. More and more customers are shopping online. Online sales are increasing globally toward 15% to 20% of total sales. Though the percentage is different in each sector.

But this is just the start. The growth of online purchases shows us that digital retailing is growing fast and this growth will continue. The main reasons for this is the huge selection you can pick, the easy way to search products, prices of these products can be easily compared, the convenience that online shopping has, returns and delivery are often free and last but not least you can find extensive product recommendations and reviews.

But still a lot of retailers do not want to change to the modern way of selling their products. The advantages of online retailing are increasing and the fast growing market is overflowing the market for traditional retailers. The main reason traditional retailers don’t want to change, is that they are struggling with computers. But there are more factors.

One factor is that they were too optimistic in the beginning. They started many online companies, but started failing soon. Retailers and digital operations needed to work together during the dot.com bubble, but they didn’t. Helping each other would make the chance of success much bigger.