How much of the overall retail business will online eventually become? Are there opportunities for more pure-play Amazon.com-like success stories to emerge? What will it take to make that happen?
Here’s the key quote: “The biggest mistake retailers make is that they see their online business as a separate business from their offline business. They don’t apply the same efforts or energy.“As for predictions, here were mine from the same time period:Will online sales grow to the sky? No, they’ll plateau eventually. E-commerce sales will continue to grow at a double-digit pace for the rest of the decade, reaching 4.3% of total sales by 2010 (Global Insight). But the rate of year-over-year growth will likely decline from 24% last year (Jupiter Research), to 20% this year (Cowen & Co.), to below 10% by 2011. The reason? The industry is maturing; most of the people who are going to spend money online are already logged on and shopping. There are no new fish coming into the pond (or, at least, rates of population and consumer growth are declining).But the influence of the Web on retail sales will continue to grow this year, next year, and every year beyond. That is because use of the Internet for pre-shopping, comparison shopping, browsing and choosing a store destination is growing more important, not less, even (or especially) if the purchase is not completed online. Therefore, even though online sales will eventually plateau, retailers need to integrate their in-store and online environments to drive traffic, provide consistent service and customer experience, get a unified view of markets and merchandise, and to increase sales, profits, market share and stock price. http://www.retailwire.com/discussions/sngl_discussion.cfm/13858
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