Sumit Kapoor
I have been an Amazon customer from the beginning and it is just amazing how far they have come from the humble beginnings of selling books online. Today you can buy everything from baby diapers to high-end electronics and everything in between. They built such a massive infrastructure that they began selling the excess capacity to customers through AWS and built an entire new line of business, which will probably start generating more profits than from sales on their online store. Of late I have noticed them letting other 3rd party sellers sell on their marketplace rather than sell directly. It’s brilliant they can provide more choices to their customers without having to maintain inventory and/or fight a margin battle.
Combine this with their brilliant devices and services like Alexa, Echo, FireTV, Kindle etc. they have surrounded us, the consumers, such that shopping has become as easy as pressing a button or calling out to Alexa, so much so that it has become second nature, something that you don’t think twice about. But, herein is the catch and a small opening for the traditional retailers to compete with Amazon.
Traditional retailers have been closing stores as they lose the millennial generation to online shopping while at the same time their online presence is unable to compensate for lost revenues. They are hoping that ultimately their online/mobile stores will one day take on the might of Amazon, however the reality is that if everyone starts selling online or on mobile the market becomes so fragmented that they might indeed drive even more traffic to Amazon. Online shopping combined with missteps along the way by brick and mortar stores, has taken the fun out of shopping as stores have scrambled to shore up their bottom line by laying off associates and closing stores. I have yet to find a person who loves chores and when shopping becomes a chore it just drives even more online shopping.
Brick and Mortar Stores had lost their charm long before Amazon came to the scene. Consolidation into large corporations and Wall Street pressures had meant that most stores became more conscious about managing their bottom and top lines than the customer shopping experience.
Retailers are missing out on exploiting their biggest strength, their brick and mortar presence. ShopJester a mobile platform, wants to help retailers, exploit their retail store presence while continuing to rapidly increase their online shopping gains by providing a single platform for online and in-store shopping. Intelligently tied together by the customer’s geo-location, travel and shopping preferences.
If stores can differentiate from each other leveraging marketing solutions like Product Information/Content Management (Akeneo), Web Content Management (Hippo), Digital Asset Management (ADAM) tied together using integration technologies (IBM, JitterBit), they can compete positively by providing customers choices which don’t cannibalize each other’s businesses. Zorang can bring together their over 80yrs of combined ECM, Retail and Integration Experience to build smart solutions for our retail customers.