Hybrid shopping evolves the future of retail.
Adrian Doran (The Irish News):
I WAS reminded of a scene from the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, when reading a new study just published by Barclays Corporate Banking on retail trends. In the movie, Tom’s character is seen walking through a bricks-and-mortar shopping mall, with ads tailored personally to him in shop windows, and a digital shop-assistant in a GAP store popping up to help him select new clothing.
Over the past two years, retail has been forced into a period of accelerated evolution
This vision was fascinatingly futuristic back then (2002, believe it or not) but now this hybrid cyber-shopping experience feels really quite close. With online retail ever popular, what does this evolution mean for the sector, for the high street, and what is the future of bricks-and-mortar retail?
Perhaps more than any other sector over the past two years, retail has been forced into a period of accelerated evolution. The pandemic drove everyone online, and now the rising cost-of-living is increasing business outgoings while reducing consumer spending.
Encouragingly for Northern Ireland’s retail sector, the Barclays study – ‘What’s in store for retail?’ – reveals that businesses here are adapting their sales models to weather these financial storms as effectively as possible.
Links between digital and physical shopping are evolving, which are opening up new opportunities and ways to generate income. Most notably, the report reveals that click-and-collect shopping, where goods are bought online but picked up from a physical store, will be worth £1.34bn2 in Northern Ireland this year.
The growth of click-and-collect in Northern Ireland follows the broader national trend that has seen this new hybrid sector of the economy swell to be worth over £42.4bn in the UK this year – a significant 8.4 per cent of the industry’s total annual income.
The popularity of the service grew during the pandemic but, unlike pure online sales which peaked during that period, it has continued to grow post the lifting of lockdown restrictions, indicating that click-and-collect is a consumer behaviour that is here to stay. This phenomenon now accounts for 39.2 per cent of sales for retailers who offer the service in Northern Ireland, up from 27.3 per cent a year ago.
The click-and-collect economy now underpins 3,600 jobs across the industry in Northern Ireland and almost a third of physical stores in Northern Ireland (31.1 per cent) are now used as click-and-collect locations.
Online and physical retail sales channels are becoming more intertwined. Consumers in Northern Ireland like to research products online and in-store in equal measure across a number of products, including DIY equipment (36.2 per cent), electronics (35.7 per cent), entertainment (34.5 per cent), and sports or outdoor equipment (34.5 per cent).
