75% of small retailers can't deal with virtual rivals

While major retailers rush to integrate physical and digital operations, this reality is too far away from the small shops. Unable to deal with stock to meet the two channels or make deliveries within a small, they can't handle the virtual competition and 75% can't cover a rival offerings in the online environment.
"The giant retailer treats multicanalidade as reality, but the fact is that 90% of retail is still exclusively analog", summarizes the retail consultant specialist in e-commerce and Professor of the Center for research and innovation at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Regina Expensive.
The academic perception comes in line with a survey of the Brazilian Association of Commerce (Abccom) that led to 60 interviewers physical stores, as consumers, to understand if the sellers of these stores are prepared for the integration of online with the offline.
According to the study, the pattern of behavior of a client nowadays involves entering the shop, ask if a certain product is in stock and already compare, on the phone, the prices of the same products in competition. Facing this reality, however, few are the retailers who can guarantee the sale even with the consumer access to the internet to refine the parameters of purchase. "The price is an unfinished business in Brazilian omnichannel," Brazil's partner Panels, Claudio Vasquez, who conducted the research in partnership with Abccom.
According to the Executive, there have been cases in which sellers have arrived to show aggressive to realize that consumers were comparing prices. The percentage of "aggressive salespersons" rose from 8% in 2014, to 14% in 2017.
According to Vasquez, this is a sign of unpreparedness and lack of training of salespeople to reconcile this new consumer profile. "Ideally, the salesman is trained to understand the profile of the new consumer and has room for matching the price of the physical with the virtual," says Vasquez.
Rocks in my shoes
To the President of the ABComm, Mauricio Salvador, many companies are investing in technology and processes, but are still focused on tools that integrate stock or automate internal processes. "In fact, the sales force can't keep up with the changes."
Salvador also underscores another of the survey: 34 percent of physical stores didn't have the product in stock for prompt delivery and 27% would take more than two days to deliver at home, the dream away from multicanalidade and may become a bigger problem in brief . "With the development of e-commerce to deliver the same day, one of the biggest advantages of physical stores, the prompt delivery, has ceased to exist", he concludes.