"Small-medium local retailers are lagging in on-line presence
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Showrooming refers to a situation when a shopper visits a store to check out a product but then purchases the product online from home. This occurs because, while many people still prefer seeing and touching the merchandise they buy, many items are available at lower prices through online vendors. As such, local stores essentially become showrooms for online shoppers”. But now, recent reports show that retailers have discovered ""reverse showrooming,"" or ""webrooming,"" which is when consumers go online to research products, but then head to a bricks-and-mortar store to complete their purchase. Reverse showrooming is actually nothing new. Since the early days of online shopping, more people have researched their shopping online than have actually bought there.
Reverse showrooming is actually more common than showrooming. In the U.S. 69% of people reverse showroom, while 46% showroom, according to a Harris poll. Amazon remains the No. 1 place where showroomers end up making their purchases, but it's an even more popular destination for reverse showroomers who ultimately buy elsewhere. Social media has also become a major referral source for bricks-and-mortar chains, not just e-commerce sites.
However, in many cases, it has become extremely difficult for potential customers to find local retailers, especially the small ones: The smaller and newer the firm, the greater the problems with online visibility. This is caused mainly by the lack resources and knowledge to create a website and publish on-line their catalogue of products: Nearly 40% of small businesses in Europe do not have a website, and only a few have their product catalogues on-line.
Smartbuy
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Small and medium-sized retailers must find their way to become the store were the webroomers finally go to end the purchase process. They have the advantage of being able to provide their customers with convenient and local access to stores. SMARTBUY aims at providing local retailers with new (or additional) on-line presence to cope with the new buying trends and expectations of customers, who are willing to find nearby products on-line.
The objective of SMARTBUY is to provide a straight forward manner of publishing and finding local products and services on-line, making available for this purpose the 1) SMARTBUY Mobile app, where local buyers can easily discover local retailers, products and promotions nearby, and the 2) SMARTBUY Retailers’ platform: where local retailers can easily and cost-effectively make and promote automatically their products on-line, attracting local audiences and increasing sales.
Based on some of the existing Smart Cities ICT infrastructures available from ongoing and previous EU projects like Organicity and FIRE+, the first version of the SMARTBUY system prototype will be deployed in Skellefteå, Luleå and Piteå (in Sweden); as well as in Patras (Greece). The feedback collected from these deployments will serve to deploy a 2nd and more advanced version of the system that will be released again in those same cities plus London (UK) and Santander (Spain), for further experimentation and replication."
