Digital Shopping
Is Revolutionizing Retail Business!
Boyé Lafayette De Mente
Boyé Lafayette De Mente
TOKYO -- Some time in the near future the world’s great department stores could become little more than drop-ship warehouses and boutiques and other stores could get few if any live shoppers…and all because of tiny all-purpose mobile phones.
This phenomenon has already begun in Japan, where shopping by mobile phone is already large and is growing at the rate of 40 percent a year.
According to government data, mobile phone shopping in 2006 reached the trillion yen mark, while the sales at department stores and shops declined. Just one online company, Rakuten Ichiba, did 460 billion yen in mobile phone sales that year.
More and more Japanese are now doing their basic shopping—for apparel, cosmetics, food, furniture, etc.—on their mobile phones while they are on their way to work, at work, in restaurants and pubs and other places, and the whole process takes only a few minutes at most.
Young women, who are always the trend leaders in virtually everything new that occurs in Japan’s huge consumer market, are in the forefront of this movement, which means it is real, it is solid, and it will grow—and manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers who ignore it will be left behind.
All signs indicate that 2006 was the tipping point for mobile phone shopping in Japan, and this movement will inevitably spread around the world as the cost of gas goes up, highways and streets become more clogged with traffic and there is growing pressure for people to drive less in order to reduce pollution.
The next country to undergo this mobile phone shopping revolution will no doubt be South Korea, the most digitally connected country in the world—and I can see it happening in China and in India as entrepreneurs in those countries seek to skip the slow and inefficient retailing process that has been characteristic of market economies since the 1880s.
One of the facets of shopping by mobile phone is that it can make a huge success of a product that hasn’t been moving in a matter of days just by making it available online.
In Japan big-name international companies like Procter & Gamble are taking advantage of this new phenomenon by promoting their cosmetic lines on mobile phones, targeting women in their 20s.
What this phenomenon may mean to the retailing industry in the world at large can be mind-boggling—not to mention frightening if it fails to keep up with the times. Instead of maintaining brick-and-mortar places, stores will have to transform themselves into warehouses that ship their goods to individual consumers—or manufacturers could replace the retailing and wholesaling businesses altogether by taking on the role of shippers as well as manufacturers.
Dell, the computer giant, Amazon.com and many other companies have already proven conclusively that people will shop online if it is made easy and secure.
This transition of the way of shopping is not going to go away. The only questions are how rapidly is it going to continue to grow, and at what point will it no longer be feasible for present-day retailers to keep their doors open.
One of the greatest benefits of digital shopping is that hundreds of millions of people would not have to get into their cars and go shopping every day or every week. This in itself would have a profound affect that would encompass the automobile industry and the oil and gas industries—which combined, make up a huge percentage of the world’s economic activity.
Talk about computers changing the world! Just wait until even more enhanced mobile phones are in the hands of just half of the world’s population!
