In thinking about how shoppers see your shop there are five areas where you control the dialogue: the prices that you charge; the quality of the products that you sell; the quality of the service you will provide; the depth of range and availability that you will provide; and the atmosphere of the shop. All are levers that an independent retailer can use to engage the loyalty of shoppers. In thinking about which are the most important for your shop, you need to think about who your key customers are; the 20% who generate 80% of the profits (note I say profits and not sales). What are they looking for and how do you match your offer to meet their interests? For example, if you have children buying trading cards, how do you make this a great buying experience for them? What other products with high margins will appeal to them? Would you put up a poster in store with a countdown to the launch of a new collection? Would you set up an in-store event so that children could swap cards with each other?
“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
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