I am here in Denver for the Shop.org Annual Summit. The first two days have been excellent and the last looks just as good. While this is essentially a conference about retail and technology – mobile, social, Internet – it is, at its heart, a conference about retail today and into the future.
It has been interesting listening to speakers talk about the challenge of online retailers and the threat many think they pose to high street retail and how high street is in the better position because of a range of undeniable economic factors (which I won’t go into here) yet high street retailers worry to the point of harming their own businesses. This thread is particularly interesting given the challenges newsagents face: disruption around plenty of what we sell, fundamental restructuring of key parts of our businesses and inability to leverage our biggest asset.
This conference reinforces for me the extent of change taking place in and around retail and the need for everyone involved in retail to have a plan for embracing navigating and change. Change goes beyond what we know today. Just one stat which is mind-boggling: 10% of sales achieved by UK retailer Marks & Spencer are done online. This is a business that was technologically in the dark ages just a few years ago. M&S are entering new countries without opening stores. Nordstrom, a US department store with US$10B+ in sales and more than 200 stores is achieving excellent online growth.
While the stories gaining the most attention are from large retailers, my core interest is small and independent retailers. I attend these conferences to learn about opportunities for this sector – to help us compete in the changing world. As with so many things in business it comes back to customer service … but that’s a post for another day.