Italiano
EnglishThe results show a fast-changing scenario, not only in the spread of online purchases but also in the challenge that eCommerce poses to traditional retail, a challenge the big retail chains finally seem to have taken up.
Human Highway’s analysis starts from the observation that the rise of eCommerce has irreversibly changed the mindset of more than 15 million people and deeply altered their habits. This is the segment of regular online buyers, responsible for more than 90% of the 30 billion euros that Italians will spend online this year on products, digital goods and services. These people have learned to use online services to choose the right product (helped by reviews and comparison sites), the right moment (promotions and sales) and the best solution (in terms of cost and convenience) for their purchase decisions. They move smoothly and shrewdly using the services they know, and have gained new power over suppliers thanks to the information they have. Online has accustomed them to being served impeccably and they do not easily tolerate levels of service below excellence. When they return to the site or the app they used for their purchases they are recognised and greeted, helped to retrace past purchases and invited to make new ones consistent with their history. Everything is ready and everything is easy: from the profile to the basket, from the payment system to the delivery address.
Then these same 15 million people walk into shops, perhaps the shops of the very same brands that serve them so well online. During their visits they feel like complete strangers; they receive no personal communication and only a little information about the products; sometimes they do not find what they are looking for, and they often have to wait to be served or to pay at the till. But 91.2% of them have a mobile phone with them: they use it naturally to help them along the path to purchase, doing a series of things that are a potential threat to the store hosting them, because they expose them to the competition, in particular online competition. The mobile phone becomes the Trojan horse that eCommerce merchants have managed to place inside traditional stores, and the resulting risk is that these become mere showrooms for eRetailers.
To understand how the traditional structure of retail distribution is reacting to the changes brought by digital, Human Highway analysed a basket of 252 organised retail brands, active in twelve product categories. Together they have a network of almost 45,000 stores across the country and generated more than 100 billion euros of purchases by Italians in 2016. 72.2% of the brands analysed let people buy online the same products they find in their physical stores. More than one brand in four, therefore, has not moved into eCommerce and serves its customers only through the traditional channel. Even so, the figure has grown strongly compared with 18 months ago, and eCommerce penetration among the brands analysed has grown by 7 percentage points. 30.9% of the brands have developed some form of cross-channel activity, promoting synergy between online and offline channels, but only 11.9% show that they have reached the goal of omnichannel integration (30 brands out of 252). The system as a whole is rather slow to adopt the distance-selling model, although two categories (Electronics, and Entertainment & Publishing) are much livelier than average and about twenty brands act as omnichannel laboratories, thanks to the progress they have made in the field and the experiments they offer customers in their stores. 133 retail brands out of 252 (52.8%, corresponding to 68.8% of stores) offer their customers an app, but fewer than half of these let customers carry out at least one task in the store during the buying process. In addition, only 17% of the brands allow products to be bought through the app, so two out of three traditional retail apps do not offer eCommerce.
The most common feature among the apps (38% of brands) is the ability to find stores based on geographical search criteria or your own position, and the second (20% of brands) is the ability to use the same loyalty programme both in store and online. Among the 133 retail apps, some have added more features to vary the occasions for use, and others take care to connect the online buying experience with the physical one, which points to a clear cross-channel strategy that uses the smartphone as the hinge between the two worlds.
The information gathered in the analysis makes it possible to build the map of Italian Net Retail, which places the 252 brands in a diagram with two dimensions: the channel hybridisation score, which grows as the cross-channel and omnichannel offer matures, and, on the vertical axis, the Smart Store Score, which sums up the richness of the digital and mobile experience the brands offer, both remotely and in store.