Traditional shopping was the order of the day some few years back but now, things have tilted and with the pandemic showing forth, a lot of people have shifted their choice from the regular grocery, supermarket and mall to ecommerce. Ecommerce was not seen as a big deal until tech giants started using the internet to sell product.
Stores like Walmart, Aldi, PEP, Shoprite, and many more were making billions in turnover yearly and they were expanding into several locations, creating franchises and taking over locations and bringing people to their store. The store business was the future when it started and then, governments started investing in malls but soon, there was a revolution.
AMAZON came in at the beginning of internet boom, and it started with selling books thereby shaking the physical bookstore industry and then it improved its services by selling other things apart from books and then they started to shake the physical grocery stores and malls. Soon the Amazon Prime came into being and people felt they do not need to wait till weekend when they are free to get what they want when they could get it faster from the comfort of their home with just a click. Then the Coronavirus pandemic came, and people felt safer ordering for whatever they needed from everything little to everything needed.
Amazon now looks like a height for every company in the business of ecommerce. Amazon is currently seen as a utopia for ecommerce stores and now local physical stores are looking at starting their ecommerce store so they can be able to satisfy their customer, Walmart for instance plans to start its Walmart plus (W+) which will be used on their ecommerce platform for users who want to get their goods delivered to them the same day.
Can physical stores beat Amazon to the game?
This is one question I ask. Ecommerce has given Amazon the ability to access people’s data and this where I have concerns about. Data is key and it has become the new gold in which companies use to fight against competing companies as well as attend to customers.