German media said that e-commerce will integrate with physical stores in the future, but there will still be businesses entering the real world.
According to the report of the Voice of Germany radio website on November 11, more and more people around the world are shopping on the Internet, which has brought huge profits to a few large companies in particular. The question now is: will all shopping be done online in the future, or will it continue to trade in the real world?
According to the report, in Germany, more than three quarters of people who search for items on the Internet will place orders immediately. There are about 50 million people who often shop online. The items purchased range from clothes, furniture, second-hand goods, tickets to vacation accommodation. However, according to the statistics recently released by the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, the performance of electronic products and food online sales is poor.
According to the report, it is still unpredictable when this trend will reverse. The scale of e-commerce is still expanding, even though the growth rate has slowed down. According to the data released by the German Trade Association, the online shopping turnover in Germany reached nearly 49 billion euros last year. It is expected to grow another 10% this year.
Hams, a trade expert at Ernst&Young, said: "Large online service providers are steadily expanding their market power and ensuring that they can get more and more cake by means of harming the retail trade." This can be seen from the lucrative Christmas life. According to a survey by Ernst&Young, one in five Germans likes to buy Christmas presents online. A year ago, the number of e-commerce users in Germany was only half of the current number.
According to the report, although online trade continues to grow, this does not necessarily mean the demise of physical retail business in the real world. According to PwC's statistics, nearly 60% of Germans will pick up their wallets at physical retail stores at least once a week. The number of people shopping in physical stores is even more than that three years ago, when only 46% of people entered physical stores for shopping.
Of course, many fixed dealers have found space for their own online development and began to sell their products online. In addition, manufacturers are pushing themselves to the Internet.
According to the report, however, this change has now reversed: some online suppliers have also ventured into the real world. Amazon has also started to run physical retail stores. The first Amazon physical retail stores have appeared in the United States.
PricewaterhouseCoopers believes that e-commerce will definitely integrate with physical stores in the future, but there will still be businesses entering the real world, because the shopping experience determines whether you buy or not.
It is reported that in 2025, people will be able to get this experience through various technical possibilities, such as augmented reality (AR) applications or shopping robots. In the future, personal assistance systems and wearable devices will directly contact the dealer's system. As a shopping assistant, smart phones will play a very important role in shopping in the future, and their importance will increase.
The report also said that online shopping is comfortable and convenient, but it also brings some problems. For example, more and more packaging waste is generated. According to the data of the German Federal Parcel and Express Logistics Association, 3.35 billion express parcels and packages were sent out in Germany alone last year, half of which were sent for online shopping. If each package is delivered to the door of the house by a delivery truck, it will be a disaster for the environment.
The report believes that new technologies are also needed to solve these problems. For example, the use of electric vehicles for door-to-door delivery, especially for optimizing transportation routes. New technologies in the field of logistics can also find a way out. Amazon is experimenting with the use of drones for parcel delivery. A small delivery robot has been used in China to deliver food to customers. But there is another problem. After people knew that Amazon destroyed large-scale returns, return processing became the focus of attention. In Germany alone, hundreds of millions of returned packages are returned to Amazon and other large e-commerce companies every year. What cannot be ignored is the large amount of garbage caused by packaging, so the online shopping boom also has some adverse factors.