Retail Reset at Post-Covid Era
The retail industry has been hit hard by COVID. The pandemic has forced retailers to close hundreds of stores and lay off thousands of employees throughout 2020, forcing brands to suspend their production activities. While those with solid e-commerce sites built on modern technology survived.They quickly made changes to adapt to restrictions and pivot to new setting at their operations. They sought to meet the new needs of customers shifting to home shopping and to generate sales. Those with traditional systems or no eCommerce channels had to deal not only with loss of customers and revenue, but also with large inventory surpluses. As a result, retail sales declined in almost every country. Globally, it is assumed that retail sector has shrunk 5.7%.
After months of dreadful statistics, stores and malls have reopened with restrictions yet we’ve observed that anxious consumers did not give up on online shopping and new options such as contactless delivery, and habits have changed permanently.
Although the pandemic is referred to as the apocalypse of retail, it also marked the beginning of a new era in which retailers, who “destroyed” physical merchandising and its practices, jumped in size with new business models. The pandemic, which grips and breaks the markets, pushes retailers to reset and restart all their processes by leaving the format and comfort areas in order to improve digital transformation and customer experience in multi-channel. It is necessary to develop merchandising, inventory management, pricing and distribution functions in order to offer online and mobile commerce alternatives for every category, every brand, and to fulfill the order at wherever the customer wants.
Our 10th Retail Conference will offer the opportunity to listen to the “new keys” for retail in brand management, supply chain, technological distribution management and data analytics from prominent speakers, examples from the world, in this period when retailers have to deal with their business from the ground up.