Phygital Retail: Future for new-age eCommerce Brands!!

The consumers of today live most of their lives online. Every aspect of everyday life has evolved to have an equivalent digital pair. Our lives are now blended with the indistinct differences of both physical and digital experiences. The most obvious point of today's retail landscape is to meet customers in the same world as theirs. Phygital retail trend blurs the lines between the physical world retailing experience and its online counterpart. Phygital retail experience aims to bring the best of both worlds together and use them to enhance the performance of the other while giving a better customer experience.

Ecommerce stores have gained traction in the last few years and have been accounting for an ever-increasing percentage of retail sales. We have been bombarded with countless theories and facts about how the digital retail landscape has been outperforming the physical store. While it's true that eCommerce has advantages over traditional brick-and-mortar retailing, it is not right to consider the two have been competing against each other. Ecommerce allows customers to browse products at their convenience, hunt for good deals, and get the order delivered straight to your doorstep. Physical retail offers the touch and feel of products, customer interaction and helps in building awareness.

What is Phygital?

Phygital retailing refers to a blend of both digital and physical retail, that involves taking the best elements of both types of retailing, combining them to capture the unique aspects of browsing with shopping in a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Many retailers now have a physical storefront to allow customers an immersive shopping experience, whereby they can choose to touch and feel their products, or they can choose to order them online and get the order conveniently delivered at their doorstep. Services such as click and collect or buy online collect in-store are examples of phygital retail. The convenience of online shopping has emerged with the instant gratification of buying in-store without waiting for days of shipping.

Your sales data might project the fall in footstep on your brick-and-mortar store; however, you might have to consider that a percentage of your online sales might be reflected from customers who visited your store and then chose to purchase the product online. This omnichannel experience will allow you to engage with your customers both online and offline, building brand loyalty.

Phygital Strategies

Phygital retailing helps customers choose their shopping channels, whether online, in-store, or social media. Streamlining all these points of experience is what constitutes a phygital strategy.

Let customers choose how they buy

Buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), also referred to as click and collect, allows the customer to shop online and then pick up at the store or a designated pick-up point. This reduces shipping costs for the retailers and also adds to additional sales revenue if people choose to pick up added items on their visit to the store. A similar example for phygital marketing is curbside pickup, where the customer orders online and pick up in person, but the customer does not even have to get out of their car. Upon arrival at the store, the customer notifies the sales staff, who brings out the order to the curb.

Provide self-checkout or no checkout

In this strategy, the customers walk into the store, pick up the items, and walk out. The digital technology tracks the customer and automatically processes the order payment through the Amazon Go app after they leave the store. Self-checkout is a convenient way of digitizing the shopping experience so that customers can shop without the hassle of waiting in queues for paying. Self-checkout kiosks can also be placed around the store to reduce the check-out counter-line.

Try AR and VR applications.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies can be used to digitally enable your customers and blur the lines between physical and online retailing. AR can be used to let customers try the product or service while they are in-store, and VR can be used to digitally immerse customers into an experience while they shop online.

Use endless aisles to keep up with supply and demand

Buy in-store and ship to home, referred to as endless aisles, is an order fulfilment solution that lets customers order their product while they are in-store and ship to their home for convenient delivery. The advantage of this fulfilment option includes the increase in in-store sales even if the product is not in stock leading to increased customer experience and satisfaction.

Use of social media to create a digital storefront

Instagram, Facebook, and tik-tok, etc., make it possible to have a digital presence for your physical retail business. You can make use of Instagram's e-commerce features to enable an eCommerce strategy and sell directly through social media.

Benefits of adopting Phygital strategies

Enhance Customer experience

Streamlining the in-store and online shopping experience simplifies the buyer's journey and makes it more convenient for the customers to interact with the business readily across various channels.

Build brand awareness and trust

The omnichannel shopping experience offered by phygital makes available many touchpoints with the customer, both digitally and face to face. By giving online shoppers the option to visit your retail store, they can engage with you and interact with your products before buying them.

Offer personalised recommendations and increase sales:

Solutions that offer personalised shopping experiences and product recommendations integrate effortlessly to sync the shopper's online and in-store purchase histories to their customer profile. This gives valuable data to the retailers about the likes and preferences of the shoppers allowing them to recommend the right products, create stronger interactions and ultimately convert into sales.?

About YRC

Your Retail Coach (YRC) is a retail consulting and eCommerce outsourcing company offering a wide range of services in retail offline, retail eCommerce, and retail omnichannel catering to a multitude of industries. With the enormous experience that YRC has accumulated over the years by working with international retail eCommerce giants, YRC understands the uniqueness and nuances of producing digital experiences for the live and online environment, so everything we create is robust and perfectly designed for its intended use. YRC will spend time analysing your business process and ensure optimisation of the business processes and roles. With the right strategy, data, and level of agility, YRC enables every retailer to reset, build back better, and grow.? YRC is one of the best among the market leaders in retail strategy consulting with a depth of capabilities, breadth of capabilities, delivering maximum client impact.

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