Companies are thinking O2O as an opportunity

Businesses have always been facing challenges for customer acquisition. That’s the reason why we have shopping malls, ecommerce marketplaces and advertising. 

For retailers who overcome this challenge, we wrote about “Advertising on Facebook and google is like breathing”. However, some online business choose to expand on the offline market for performance and branding purposes.

These challenges bring doubt on whether it is worth to go online OR offline across all industries.

Well, it seems that recently companies choose both options to have more opportunities.

Online to Offline

E-commerce platforms want to get more and more market share by implementing offline presence and data.

As market size cannot exceed total internet penetration in a country, an expansion growth can be triggered by offline presence.

In fact, for e-commerce industry many players around the globe applied this strategy, converting online consumers to the offline market. 

Users get the opportunity to have cheaper price and also a new user experience that could be valuable. Think about it, who thought about buying a product to an unmanned store?

Believe it, these stores exist, this is called the “New retail”. Here are few examples: Alibaba’s Hema supermarket in China, AmazonGo in the US, JD.ID store in Indonesia.

With such infrastructure and technologies, companies can get more consumer data: traffic through tracking, analysing emotions with AI solutions and facial recognition.

Offline to Online

Retail market has been dominating market consumer (Offline) until internet (Online) appeared.

While ecommerce were educating the market & gained more and more market share, retailers has been facing some issues regarding that.

The main problem that consumers noticed was the pricing strategy, consumer noticed that ecommerce price was cheaper the offline prices.

At this point, the customer journey has been break up by the new technology, but new opportunity came out to play.

Retailers integrate new solutions such as online payment by scanning a product in a store. Acquiring these data can be valuable to check inventory, data acquisition and develop key performance indicators.

Moreover most business model adopted social ecommerce by using social media channel.

In the retail industry, it can be critical to promote social media account to acquire customers. In France, it can be common to see Snapchat QR code in the outdoor ads space.

At the end it’s a war of data, combining online and offline data to get best performance ever.