Essay About Retail Business And Physical Retailers

Education in India: Offline to online Retailing
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Offline to Online RetailingE-Commerce has been hitting the retail business very badly i.e. the traditional shops have been out of business because of the success of the e-commerce. It can be very safely said that ecommerce has hit the offline world very badly taking them out of equation. Price comparison sites are making things very tough for physical retailers with no online presence – and physical retailers that do have websites are faced with a painful e-commerce choice.  Do they discount the same products online, or do they try to maintain the same prices in store or on the website?If they go with same pricing, they are at severe risk of being undercut by large volume e-commerce discounters who have very few overheads, and run everything from a warehouse (like Amazon).  If they go with online discounting, they risk  destroying any profitability that remains in their physical stores.So the above described overheads are the expenses incurred in a retail store are cost of rent of premises, Electricity charges, Salary for workers and many other administrative costs. A normal retailer would be having a decent amount of expenses but consider a retail shop in a mall where the rent alone is very high. They can convert all these rents and expenses into an offering to a Customer! Now most of the E-commerce websites are following two models: Warehousing & Marketplace. So the retailers should consider going online in the model of marketplace. They will have a huge advantage of serving local market and also they will get a customer visibility of the whole nation. This give them a scope not only to retain their business but also expand. Few facts regarding the customer base you will be able to reach is 30,00,00,000 out of which 17,50,00,000 are of mobile users and e commerce sites are doing everything to capture that customer base . So basically the advertising costs are spent by them. Projections by Delloite suggest that the demand and supply of this sector will be 60Bn$ by 2017 and will grow forever. Online retail have changed the landscape of consumption. In fact there is an estimated increase in the consumption by around 2%.         So, the offline retailers should be wise and go online. By saying this the retailers of various segments have various options. Like textiles business can never go online but the service for tailoring can. It lies in the wisdom of retailers to choose what business to take online and enjoy benefits of the same And also small scale manufacturers should capitalize on this opportunity and cut the distribution cost and remove middlemen and give that benefit to the consumers