A former colleague bought an existing corner shop and began to stock slightly more exotic items. Being on a fairly busy pedestrian thoroughfare in a tourist town, he realized he was being frequently asked about whether or not he would do mail orders and postal deliveries of the merchandise he stocked. This spawned a small e-commerce venture which over time has come to represent more than 75% of the revenue of his business.
Where we live, is still the centre of our universe and the COVID19 pandemic has taught us that accessibility of retail is one of the most appealing pieces of the new work-from-home hybrid norm that many, who would traditionally traipse into the office with a wasteful commute would have to suffer. There are enough surveys out there that will tell you, that for many, working from home is far more appealing than any would have imagined.
One of the characteristics of those that work-from-home, is that they often establish pantry stocks of favourite foods. This might include staples as well as specialities like those that my former colleague is selling. When the stocks start to dwindle these consumers are faced with the question of how to get more.
Building trust is now not just about “who” and “where”, but also about “what”. Retail consumers in the past would have focused very much on the immediacy of supply. Shortages, like the run on toilet paper, supply chain challenges that led to exhausted supply stocks and the closure of many stores due to the lack of footfall became a major headache for retailers. All this and the inability to sustain sales because of the absence of an online presence or relationship with a delivery carrier meant many corner store businesses disappeared.
For many consumers shopping decisions were all about the “when” that has all changed to a focus on “how” and “where”. Assuming retailers all have stock and that I can determine their stock levels and like their price, the decisions come down to proximity, lead time to delivery and costs to service. Previously I have written about the rise of “dark stores“, they remain a constant reminder that the retail network and how consumers think about retail are constantly evolving. While shopping and market shopping changed with the advent of the supermarket and department stores, that was all focused on one-stop shopping and retailers would enhance interest through the cunning positioning “at cost” of low-cost essentials, all inducements to get boots in the door. Today that is not enough.
What used to be all about convenience, now has become a narrative strongly tied to trust. Consumers love Amazon’s dependability so much, that they are prepared to spend hundreds of dollars each, every year, to sustain Amazon delivery reliability. In many instances the Prime offerings arent even necessarily Amazon direct offerings but instead fulfilled by Amazon or furnished by reliable network participants committed to the fast delivery model. We all want to trust that e-retailers are going to supply us with what we want in a prompt and committed timeframe that works for us. If not, we’ll have to go down to the corner store or box store and get what it is we want. Some say that “opportunities to build trust lie in the first and last mile“, and that the whole story is rooted in supply chain effectiveness and efficiency, however, Pretectum thinks about this problem differently.
The Pretectum view is that the real opportunity to build trust in fact lies in the correctness and appropriate use of consumer customer data. It may seem terribly intuitive but the daily reality for many organizations is that they don’t necessarily have great data and the data that they do have may not be quite so ethically sourced or used.
Many traditional retailers were caught off guard by the rise of the digital shopper, my former colleague included. Supplementary services like Food Panda and Hero, Deliveroo, Instacart, Doordash and Postmates and now even Uber eats, have a wide array of choices from plates of food and cans of pet food and toilet paper delivered from the click of a mouse to your doorstep accompanied by the ring of the doorbell.
For the armchair warrior and the introvert, it has become a great unburdening for the need to step out of their habitat except for the most essential of events or circumstances.
The uplift of door-to-door delivery services has also seen more people in this gig economy-related service role of the part-time (or full-time) delivery of goods. But they’re not interested in long-haul transportation gigs, they want short journeys that can be done messenger bag style, covering no more than a couple of miles per delivery.
For the corner store with a heaving stock room and an online presence, yes, they feel the need to engage with one of these platforms but there is nothing to stop them from establishing their own informal local courier network and leveraging the power of their customer data to maintain relationships with their audience.
The challenge with the mainstream platforms is that they have the customer data and they have the customer relationship and your business, as a network participant is dealing with a faceless customer. That means no upsell, no customer loyalty, and no customer relationship. Your little business is at the mercy of the network.
Pretectum’s API-enabled customer master data management platform can be of help, in not only your outbound customer outreach objectives but also in other areas of your e-commerce and regular commerce relationship with your customers.
It doesn’t matter if your business is a hair salon, a nail bar, a tailor, a restaurant, a coffee shop or cafe, a laundromat and dry cleaning business or pet groomers, florists, health care or food and commodity retail. If you have more than a thousand known customers who you want to maintain a continuous and sustained relationship with, then the chances are that your business would benefit from customer master data management.
You’ll be surprised at how cost-effectively you can implement Customer Master data Management (CMDM) and apply it to your business, from search and preferences all the way down to household and duplicate identification. Contact us today, to learn more.