Why category leading brick and mortar retailers are likely the biggest long term Covid…

It doesn’t matter how clean and well lit your stores are and how friendly and knowledgeable the employees are if the stores are in the wrong place at the wrong cost or they don’t have the right products at the right prices.

It was not until Wal-Mart bought Jet.com in 2016 that retail executives began to broadly wake up and embrace e-commerce. Marc Lore was the CEO and founder of Jet.com and an excellent e-commerce executive who had founded diapers.com and soap.com

Brick and mortar stores also enable BOPIS (buy online pickup in store) and the in-store return of items purchased online, which consumers value. Economically, BOPIS will always be cheaper than same day delivery and large numbers of consumers are highly cost sensitive.

Many of the perceived Covid winners such as e-commerce, videogame and streaming media companies have simply been pulled a few years forward into a future that was inevitable. Their destiny did not change. The future for those businesses simply accelerated whereas the future for category leading “brick and mortar” retailers has changed dramatically ... See more

Amazon’s retail business may actually be disadvantaged long term by Covid due to more intense long term competition as thousands of SMBs have taken advantage of services from Wix, Shopify, etc. to go online, category leading retailers are investing online like never before and brands are investing in their DTC strategies — all at the same time that... See more

Brick and mortar stores significantly lower online CAC by improving marketing efficiency (higher click through rates, higher quality scores for ads). Consumers are more likely to trust a brand they have seen in the real world. Ironic in a world where “CAC is the new rent” that one of the best ways to lower your online rent, i.e. CAC, is to pay rent... See more

Data and analytics mattered much more online than having a great team of human merchants. There was a great story in the “Everything Store” about how the algorithms outperformed the human editors that Amazon employed in their book section. A culture of relentless A/B testing and data driven decision making was essential to online success.

Every category leading physical retailer will have a 3p marketplace. These 3p marketplaces will benefit from integration with the stores in the sense that many new DTC brands will not sell on Amazon, but will happily sell through other 3p marketplaces especially if they are attached to a fleet of thousands of stores and the owner of the 3p marketpl... See more

Beyond an erroneous belief that e-commerce was unprofitable which kept them from investing in e-commerce, brick and mortar retailers struggled online for cultural reasons.