Online giant makes bricks & mortar move

by Carla Bridge @ eTailToday.com.au

High profile online retailer, dstore, will open its first bricks and mortar store on Brisbane’s fringe before Christmas.

dstore CEO Andrew Cooper said the move to couple its online presence with traditional retail outlets was driven by dstore’s interest in forming relationships with its customers across channels.

“People shop online, they research online, they shop offline and sometimes they research offline and then go and buy online. What we’re providing is an additional channel for customers.

“It will be a test of the multicahnnel shopper theory and will be more of a destination where you can pick up a product you’ve ordered online, make a return or buy the product you saw available online,” Cooper said.

dstore is only the second major foray of an Australian e-tailer into traditional bricks and mortar retailing, following the failed EzyDVD.

The first store, Homewares@dstore, will focus on homewares only and will house a warehouse facility and internet kiosks at which customers can purchase from the internet or browse dstore’s online catalogue. Cooper expects to have up to six differently focused stores trading in the next year.

“We’ll have people helping customers through the kiosk purchasing behaviour so we can educate them. We’re looking at quite a different retailing concept and we know behaviours are sometimes hard to change and we’ll be devoting a fair bit of energy to that.

Cooper said Australia was well behind the US and UK markets when it comes to online retailing, and that these two markets were dstore’s benchmark.

“There’s an argument that the US is more open to catalogue purchasing because of their historical preference, but the UK doesn’t have that and they have at least double the penetration we have here in Australia.

“The online market in Australia hasn’t been stirred up by launches by traditional merchants. We’ll become a traditional merchant by going offline to fill that gap out there. We’d be happy to take the leadership position in that whole multichannel marketing space,” he said.

In terms of dstore’s online presence, Cooper said the company would be rolling out new technology in the personalisation space in the next 12 months, however, it was too early to discuss details.

Source: eTailToday.com.au