Although online sales are growing at a rate of 19.5 percent year-on-year, the majority of retail purchases still occur in bricks and mortar stores.
Many pure play eCommerce businesses have demonstrated that the physical shopping experience cannot be matched online. Amazon trialed six physical bookstores and six more are on the way this year thanks to their success. Farfetch has begun digitising the in-store experience via a “Store of the Future” platform which records customers’ likes and dislikes to provide sales assistants with the information they need in order to offer a more ‘tailored’ service in-store.