PW: Traditional retailer should be active in the integration of line under the transition

Absrtact: The latest global survey of PwC, an international accounting and consulting firm, shows that with the advent of e-commerce and social media mania, consumers are looking forward to a chain-wide retail model under the line, and traditional retailers should be actively transforming into the O2O of online integration

The latest global survey of PwC, an international accounting and consultancy firm, shows with the advent of e-commerce and social media boom, consumers look forward to the line under the linkage of the full retail model, traditional retailers should be active to the line under the integration (O2O) aspects of transformation, but this transformation is still facing a very difficult.

The PWC report interviewed more than 15,000 online consumers, including 900 Chinese online consumers. Survey results show that most consumers expect to be able to purchase, pay and book online, and in the most convenient time and place to extract goods online, through the network to check the store inventory, online under the line with a consistent promotional and easy to on-line offline entity shop online to buy goods to return.

Chinese consumers are more likely to see a full channel of customer experience, and if there is a full channel, consumers will increase their purchases, said Yuya Kali, a partner at PwC, the Hong Kong retail and consumer goods business.

The survey shows that Chinese consumers have a much higher share of online transactions and content consumption via smartphones than in the US, such as shopping, catering bookings, watching movies and television. Of the 15 most visited social media in the world, six are Chinese websites, and Chinese consumers prefer to post brand experience reviews, research brands, focus on brands or retailers or buy goods in social media.

The trend of O2O has been quite obvious, especially in the market development of the Internet, far exceeding the Chinese market in Europe and America. However, traditional Chinese retailers are facing more problems in this process of transformation.

The report shows that first of all, domestic retailers in the inventory, supply chain and category management, customer analysis and quality of service, such as the basic quality is not strong enough. Second, the internal integration of enterprises, many retailers still failed to fully access their online, offline and mobile channels between the separation. The shortage of talents and in-depth understanding of customers is also a problem that many retailers cannot avoid.

In addition, physical retailers tend to establish a broad portfolio of commodities in the O2O transition, which has many inventories and a unified online/offline pricing, but this strategy causes the entire portfolio to fall and inventory rise. This requires retailers to have a flexible grasp of commodity and pricing strategies, especially product mix and differentiation.

In the survey, Chinese consumers were accustomed to a significantly higher percentage of online shopping per week or even daily, with more than 60% Chinese consumers buying at least once a week, compared with only 21% per cent globally, Reuters said.

China's E-commerce market will overtake the US as the world's first in 2016, with about $1.85 trillion trillion in e-commerce transactions in China, according to the iresearch consultancy report. China's third-party mobile payments will also expand rapidly, expected to reach 8.5 trillion yuan in 2016. 2013 for 1.22 trillion yuan, of which Alibaba's Alipay accounted for three-fourths of the share.