Author Archives: Malcolm Wicks

Customers want better promotions

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The Grocer and the press are giving a lot of coverage to the importance customers give to clear pricing and quality offers. What can retailers do to increase shopper trust in their promotions? The purpose of any in-store promotion is ultimately to sell more products but promotions also play a key role in attracting customers to the store and encouraging them to keep coming back for more. However, to get all three benefits from a promotion shoppers have to be able to easily understand the promotion Read more [...]

Only Amazon matters

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A lot of people think that most on-line retailers are growing faster than their bricks-and-mortar competitors.  Apparently that's only true for Amazon.   The Internet Retail Top 500 Guide 2013 compares retailers over the past 10 years. It states that the top web-only retailers annual growth rate over the decade is 15.6% - without Amazon. This compares to an average annual growth rate over the same period of 17% for the top retail chains. I see this as a great achievement for physical stores. Read more [...]

How Amazon gets customer reviews

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Customer reviews are one of the main reasons why shoppers go to Amazon. So how does Amazon get so many customers to write those reviews? Getting the first customer review on any product is difficult. Most shoppers have a reluctance to be the first to write anything and those that do often write a negative comment due to a bad experience with the product.  This has been the experience of many retailers when they started customer review programmes and caused some to either drop the idea or in Read more [...]

Amazon own brand

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Amazon continue to add new departments such Car Store, DIY, Health & Beauty but a less visible area is their plans for own brands. If you visit the Amazon site and search for "Amazon Basics" you will get over 49,000 results. Some products will be "basic" products from different manufacturers but others will be branded AmazonBasics. You will also be given the option of visiting Amazon's own Store, AmazonBasics, which has the tagline "High quality products at the lowest price". Currently they Read more [...]

Retail is detail – customer demands increase with new technology

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The least enjoyable part of most shopping experiences is queuing to pay. Once customers have made their selections they want to get out of the store as quickly and easily as possible. Some customers will even choose not to go to stores with long queues. In fact several retailers who cut the number of staffed checkouts to reduce costs have now reinstated them because their sales loses were greater than the cost savings. One solution to reducing queue sizes is self service checkouts however Read more [...]

Own label products can make shoppers go elsewhere

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Own label products can be good for retailers by increasing profits and good for customers by reducing prices. But, retailers can pay a heavy price if they attempt to mislead shoppers. Which? discovered that 20% of members in their recent survey have bought what they thought was a big brand product only to discover that it was a supermarkets own brand that looked similar. As a result 30% felt misled and 38% were annoyed. These shoppers have now lost trust in their retailers which will change how Read more [...]

The Amazon approach to getting customers to buy

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Amazon know how to give shoppers lots of reasons to buy but, physical stores can also use those techniques to sell more at the shelf edge. The Amazon Approach has been our most popular white paper download. It dissects the techniques that Amazon use on their website and illustrates how physical store can apply them and better compete with Amazon. Amazon is a topic that comes up in many of our conversations with retailers. As a result we're not just learning from Amazon but also developing Read more [...]

HMV – lets help it survive

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Sometimes it's important that all of us who LOVE retail work together to support a common cause.  I believe that we all need to actively help HMV survive. I am very hopeful that HMV will stay on the high street and it seems that a vast number of other people would like to see that happen too. However, it will only happen if we support HMV with more that just words. They need our custom. I am going to personally commit to buying at least one product from HMV every month in 2013. I've already Read more [...]

Retailers budgets for 2013

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Many retailers are planning their budgets for 2013 and a lot of focus is on trialling and installing new technology in stores.  But are they missing something? The overriding priority for almost all retailers in 2013 is to get more shoppers into their stores. Once inside the store retailers want as few shoppers as possible to leave without buying anything and the average number of products purchased to increase. Technology is very exciting but in terms of priorities it's vital not to forget Read more [...]

Amazon and showrooming

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Amazon is becoming the source of product information used before shoppers actually buy in stores. The much talked about showrooming threat that most shoppers would go into stores to look at products and then order them on their mobile from Amazon, while in the store, has not come to pass. Certainly some shoppers use Amazon in store to gain more detailed product information but most end up actually buying in from the store. It could even be that the provision of product information in stores from Read more [...]