Retailer/Customer Relationships: What Retail 2012 Can Learn From Retail 1912

Fast-forward about 75 years and just about everything had changed. People still went shopping, but they visited gigantic malls and cavernous supermarkets where the name of the game was choice, selection and service, but of a different sort. Goods and services were on display in aisles or on racks for consumers to touch and smell and sometimes even sample before they purchased. Consumers served themselves, loading their basket or shopping bag with the goodies they wanted to buy.

Checkout still happened at the counter, but the transaction was largely impersonal between a cashier and a customer who’d already decided what she wanted to purchase. The cashier simply “rang up” the transaction. Still, customers seemed happy to trade personal service for the liberating experience of being independent while in a buying mode.

Retailers seemed just as happy with the trade-off too, as they could serve, or more appropriately enable the service of many more consumers. This transition also allowed retailers to preserve even more of their already razor-thin margins. What defined this retail experience more than anything else was efficiency. What does all of this have to do with retail in 2012 and beyond? Well, just about everything.

Creating a Modern-Day Personal Retail Relationship
What consumers lost when modern-day retailers turned their attention to efficiency is the personal relationship that’s always been at the core of the retail experience. That’s exactly what merchants — large and small — are working vigorously to reclaim 100 years later. That means anticipating what their customers want, letting them know when it’s available for them to buy and providing them with information about that product as they’re making their buying decision. It also means creating a relationship with a consumer that’s far more personal than an email announcement of a sale or deal.

There are zillions of companies circling around this multitrillion dollar retail industry eager to help merchants recreate and modernize the shopping experience of 100 years ago. Some have focused on ways to make shopping more efficient. For example, players like Price Check, Product Graph and AisleBuyer enable merchants to offer price and inventory checks on items in-store, provide product reviews and information, and even enable checkout in the aisle. Other vendors enable retailers to offer coupons or similar schemes to drive consumers into stores to make purchases and begin a relationship (e.g., ordering online and picking up in-store).

Groupon and LivingSocial are the grandfathers of these schemes, relying largely on email to drive foot traffic to local merchants. Apps like shopkick, Scoutmob, Bloomspot and a growing number of retailer-specific apps provide mobile access to offers that can be redeemed in-store. Still others like Apple’s ZipCheck combine service and checkout anywhere the customer happens to be in the store. Pioneers like the recently launched beta version on Facebook of getta!Table, which offers exclusive daily offers from the best local restaurants, are pursuing a vertical strategy on that new commerce frontier to make purchasing efficient (i.e., directly on merchant fan pages) and redemption in-store, again with the hope that new customers will have a good experience with that merchant and eventually develop a long-term relationship with them.

While different, all of these schemes rely on three essential ingredients to make this new retail experience possible:

• mobile phones that provide access to the internet and thousands of apps in the hands of just about any consumer who wants one;
• IP-enabled point-of-sale systems (including tablets) that offer a richer consumer experience in and out of stores; and
• mobile apps that live in the cloud now literally cloud the distinction between online and offline transacting.

After nearly two decades of being able to shop online, consumers are finally comfortable doing so. Transacting on a mobile phone today is as easy and becoming as second nature as shopping on a PC.