High Street Shops Should Embrace Online To Attract Consumers

Marketing is a field in which change happens fast and those who fail to adapt are bound to lose their ground. Recently, this has referred to many high street retailers and the reasons causing their misfortune are exposed in an analysis in the Manchester Evening News.

According to the newspaper, there are two main factors that have driven customers away from the high street. The first one is the emerging shopping centres, both within and outside the city. These centres provide a vast range of products and services all in one place, including various forms of entertainment, which makes them more convenient and easily accessible.

The second factor is the huge growth of online and mobile shopping, which allows many consumers to shop chiefly from home. More important, however, is the fact that often online shopping is cheaper than going to the shops. With many consumers counting on online as a main channel for shopping, competition has largely moved onto the web, in the form of exclusive offers, deals and other special content, and this is what many high street retailers have failed to come to terms with.

In order to stay competitive, high street shops should integrate online and offline channels, provide additional value and concentrate on service and delivering a complete shopping experience. Brick and mortar shops can provide quality service and attention that cannot be received online, so the basic task is to combine both channels by using the web to attract people to the high street, the paper concludes.