Shopping Center Marketing Online Innovation, Part 1

Posted by David Allred

With traditional retail sales facing year-over-year declines, the great recession is not the only culprit. According to Forrester Research, online sales may account for 10% of all holiday shopping this year, or about $44 billion, up from about 5% to 7% of U.S. shopping that typically happens online.

The biggest question mall-based retailers have is: how do we compete? Two challenges are sharing information and making it easy for shoppers to buy. Unfortunately, there is not one solution to these challenges. But hey, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.

Start with Twitter. Using a Twitter aggregator application, an organized collection of stores (i.e. a mall) could empower it’s retailers to feed information on sales, special offers, discounts, available inventory, etc. into a portal that would allow a local shopper the ease of “following” those options. With time, more online shopping options for terrestrial retailers may emerge and links to ecommerce for these items can begin to be included in these updates, making it easy for the shopper to buy.

Again, there are many different directions that traditional retailers are going to have to go. The issue is this: how much more in sales are going to have to shift online before they take a more serious approach to also being in the virtual space more and more customers are gravitating to?

Check back tomorrow for part 2 of a series.