The Media have gone digital - shouldn't high street retailers do the same?

It's safe to say that, economically, things are maybe a bit troublesome. With austerity measures pushing the country into a recessionary position and a mixed bag of high street sales reports indicating that at best, things aren't terrible, it was refreshing to see a new report from IMRG that stated that e-retail was up by 16%.

Now, while the current UK Government's economic policy plays a large part in the reduction of consumer spending, the report did leave me wondering why e-retail growth hasn't suffered as much as High Street retail.Certainly there are the obvious traditional reasons – cheaper prices, the ease of home delivery and being able to quickly find and buy items due to well implemented SEO and PPC. This leads me to a larger query though: has an increase in the amount of time we spend online as a society changed how we prefer to shop?

Have we become so accustomed to quickly finding what we want, when we want it (at the touch of our fingertips) that the idea of physically searching through stores seems off-putting?

It's definitely how I feel. When I briefly moved back home to Falkirk after I graduated from university, it frustrated me no end that I couldn't go into town to find something as simple as a book (Flat Earth News, if you're  wondering). I went into the only bookshop I could find and it was a disorganised mess: excess stock that reflected fads and trends (Twilight),organisation that resembled a bowl of Alphabetti Spaghetti, and a somewhat depressing number of empty shelves.

I ended up asking the staff about the book and was told that while they didn't have it, I could get it ordered in. I decided to just go home and order it from Amazon for the same price instead of spending yet another £3 to get into town to return to the store.

There are probably many reasons why the shop was like that, but, to me, it seems as though in the physical retail world, the balance of product sales and customer experience is tilted more in favour of the products - with the downside of this being that the customer experience becomes a secondary concern; a balance that I feel is reversed online in places like Amazon, Steam, Play, etc.  From this, I've been wondering if high street retail shops should perhaps attempt to adopt a stance that's perhaps more in-line with that of online e-commerce.

I'm not saying that offline retail can be personalised to every shopper to the same extent that e-retail can and a broader selection of goods will generally have to be stocked to cater to a much larger, unfiltered, demographic, but I do feel that steps could be taken to at least attempt to shift things in a more user orientated direction.

Take, for example, the store navigation. In a lot of outlets, you'll often find a brief chart by the entrance; it's generally very broad and only gives you a rough idea of where the product you want is. If we approach this concept with the mentality of an online shopper, then the more time and effort it takes to get to an item, the greater the odds are that they’ll go elsewhere, especially if the price of the good isn’t immediately to their liking when they do find it. With the advent of the Smart-phone, it’s now even easier compare the price of a good online and purchase it somewhere cheaper from inside the store itself; although whether shops will let you  do this is a different matter. In addition, with low consumer confidence and a decline in discretionary income it's only natural that there's a rise in price conscious consumers more willing to shop around. By offsetting this with greater and more efficient customer experience, a store may retain a customer that it would have otherwise lost.

There are, of course, difficulties that may be hard to overcome. While online we have cookies and shopping history to customise an interface to display relevant content, retail stores don’t have this level of shopper personalisation.

Looking to the future though, a (maybe ambitious) solution to this could be a Smart-phone application that provides you with in-store navigation as you enter the shop. Cinema chains currently provide applications over Blue-tooth when you enter them, so why couldn't retail stores do something similar? This app could then store browsing history and tailor the interface for related products. If you want to go the full hog, why not let said app act as an online store so that if the product is out of stock, the customer can just buy it online from the application they’re currently using. That last part may sound like it defeats the purpose of shopping offline, but I think it might help merge the on/offline shopping experience into one, giving the customer an immediate second avenue of purchase from the same retailer and lowering the odds of them bouncing to another shop.

So where does the future lie? Are we changing as a society? Have I spent too much time indoors or could retailers benefit from the experience of SEO agencies like QueryClick in developing future technologies? Feel free to let me know.