It has been said that, “shopping online no longer exists. It’s just shopping”. With customers buying across multiple screens and channels to suit their specific goals each time, a seamless, consistent shopping experience is essential – from the way each channel looks, to the technology used to power them.
Over the past few years, retailers in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region have made a conscious attempt of moving the store experience online. Ramanathan Hariharan, Group Director & Board Member at Landmark explains how the group gave special focus to enhance online experience of consumers. “In the last few years we have been trying to bring online experience to consumers. We got in a tech team to enhance customer experience and bringing businesses to think online.”
However, this does not come without challenges, the biggest of these being able to track consumer journey. “We still don’t have an advanced technology that will track the consumer’s behavior the moment he or she enters the physical store to shopping online. While Google has metrics that allows you to monitor this, we still have a long way to go to track consumer behavior,” said Mr Hariharan.
Another challenge in business transformation is implementing strategies that work both for online and offline. Mr Hariharan said, “There needs to be a mindset shift in businesses to allow new strategies that will complement both the offline and online experience of the consumer. We need an organizational initiative where the team comes together to think both offline and online as connected channels and not competing channels”.
Fiscal stores are a dominant part of the retail industry. Despite the increase in percentage of people shopping online, physical stores are here to stay. Mr Ramanathan says that ‘stores will need to change to become more interactive and experiential’.
For Landmark Group, mobile has been a powerful shopping device with 60 percent online traffic coming from online and 30 percent transactions happening through mobile. “Looking at the behavior of the shopping consumer online, mobile holds a lot of significance for the Landmark Group. Native apps are a very important part of old technology as we saw the conversions were twice as compared to non-native apps.”
Mr Hariharan made these comments while speaking at the ArabNet Summit 2016 held in Dubai.