Want to Beat Amazon? Focus on Mobile.
Right now, retailers in the United States are likely kind of, well, concerned. Amazon, with its dizzying array of products, ease of use and delivery to most anywhere is pretty much eating brick-and-mortar retails lunch. However, Drync founder and CEO Brad Rosen thinks he may have the answer to worried retailers: focus on the mobile experience.
The acquisition of Whole Foods wasn’t just about groceries, Rosen notes. It was also about just over 330 new liquor licenses the company landed. That’s going to represent a serious shift in how customers buy and lay claim to alcohol. So how can anyone compete with a well-funded juggernaut that has a massive audience and access to just about any product under the sun for delivery to your location? The answer: a better mobile experience.
Over 72 percent of Amazon’s customers are actually buying on mobile devices right now, Rosen noted, a point that should really hit home when you consider it started out as a desktop offering. What’s more, 77 percent of shoppers in the US are turning to smartphones to help them shop even in brick-and-mortar outlets.
So it becomes a matter of fusing the two programs together: improving the mobile experience, and improving the mobile experience to work alongside the brick-and-mortar operation. Amazon is just now trying to do that; it’s built its mobile experience to a trice, but now it needs to get its brick-and-mortar operation up and running.
This is the opportunity that brick-and-mortar shops have. They already have this concept in place, but now they have to augment their own mobile experiences to match Amazon’s. There’s a value in brick-and-mortar storefronts; buying certain things online without trying them on or seeing how they fit or work is just not going to work. Think about buying a television; do you want to buy it sight unseen, or do you want to see what the picture looks like first?
The answer, therefore, is a combination of mobile and physical technology that gives people access to the showroom experience along with the full range of products and delivery options. The only way to beat Amazon, it seems, is to be Amazon.