Online shopping killing brick and mortar retailers
By Abhishek Arora
The soaring success of Big Billion Day Sale by Flip Kart and Amazon which recorded a 33 % rise in their sales this year has added to the worries of retailers in smaller towns.
Sharing his concern over the declining physical sales, Young entrepreneur Vikram Sharma said, “The buying pattern of the customers has drastically changed since the last 3 years. Earlier people used to visit stores for shopping and preferred to buy things from physical stores. But Now buyers wait for discounts offered by online sites.” These online websites and ecommerce apps promise additional benefits to keep customers out of the retail stores. Now, customers visit retail stores just to physically experience the desired product, the salesmen make their mind hoping that they would get some sales, but to their dismay, the customers place an order online instead.
Owing to the availability of cheap internet new customer base is shifting to online platforms. This new throng of online shoppers opt to use bank offers including affordable EMIs and attractive product exchange schemes to buy high-value items like electronics and appliances in smaller towns and cities where such incentives are rarely offered by offline retailers.
Online shoppers have to face various problems while shopping form online platforms, the issue of fake products being a major threat. Payment failures, account hacking also should deter the online buyers but despite the problems, online shoppers still prefer the E market as their first choice.
If this online business keeps surging, the retail market is set to face a crisis in the coming years.
Either the manufacturing companies should bring a parity between the online and offline market or the govt. should enforce certain laws to provide a level playing field to the retailers.
