Managing retail in-store experience in the supermarkets to attract and retain the customers and to compete with the e-commerce

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been a phenomenal growth of e-commerce in India. It all started with the accelerated growth of internet applications into fields of everyone’s everyday activities. When Flipkart showcased the huge market that is available for grabs, other global and domestic e-commerce businesses including US giant Amazon started targeting Indian consumers. They established themselves with the benefit of easy shopping with the help of a few clicks and eliminated the time consuming process of in-store shopping. But in order to compete with each other and to attract as much of the target customers to themselves, they started a discount spree. Although most of them realise that this is not a sustaining strategy to attract customers in the long term, many of the consumers have started to shift from in-store shopping to online shopping. Because of this, now the customers are no longer loyal to any one retail channel and with more number of options available the geography is no longer a boundary for most of them. This has affected the business of many retail supermarkets, which have begun to seen a declining trend in the footfall of their in-store customers, especially in the last couple of years. The share prices of various retail giants of India have seen steep decline and are struggling to cope with this changing environment.