Physical retail sales have faced a serious visitor drop with a ban and fear with an epidemic. With the vaccine, the epidemic reduced its impact in 2021 and increased the number of visitors as the shopping mall did not face several shutdowns as 2020. Although the shopping malls could not catch with their pre-pandemic numbers, according to the shopping center index published by the Council of Shopping Center, at the end of 2021. Between JLL Turkey, July 2019 and 2021, there was a 20% decrease in the number of visitors, which JLL is managing Türkiye. Despite this deficiency, the turnover figures of the shopping mall recorded an increase of 45%. This may indicate that visitors prefer to shop at shopping malls in 2021, but they reduced their shopping time and frequency of trips, and only came to the malls for their needs.
In the process that begins with epidemic, retailers had to improve themselves in e-commerce, and digitization was unavoidable. According to INZLEM Aydın Ayvacı from the capital, with the influence of epidemic, companies increased by 85% in 2020 and reached online sales that they would arrive in 10 years in just one year. The growth continued in 2021, and increased by 60%. This increase has not only occurred in companies that are already present in e-commerce, but also in companies that accelerated their digitization processes and entered e-commerce with epidemic. According to Capital, while there were about 50 thousand e-commerce businesses before the epidemic, this number has reached 320 thousand today.
With the effect of lower epidemic, everyone started talking a lot about what the retail situation would be. At this point, which was always said that physical stores lost their impact and customers liked online. However, it was seen with the first quarter of 2022, which is not completely true. January and February 2022 According to AVM indices, shopping centers – published by Turkey, the number of shopping mall visitors in January 2022 increased by 128.1% compared to January 2021, and the rate was 97.1% compared to February.
All these figures suggest that the post-pandemic retail industry will be present in both online and physical stores, and most of the physical stores have reached the number of visitors before the epidemic. In this process, retailers began to see the importance of not only being online or being physically present, but both. In an interview with Retail Türkiye, A101 Marketing General Manager Cüneyt şahin stated that he took three factors in mind; Omnichannel, digitization in data focus, and personal experience. He mentioned that he aims to provide personal experiences by analyzing the habits and expectations of his customers, which he has developed. Carrefoursa General Manager Kutay Kartaliolu said that customer experience and e-commerce are their primary goals. He said that physical merchandising will not die, but on the contrary, it is a prediction that apart from e-commerce, multi-channel system will be adopted. He also stated that digital changes are important and as Carforesa, they allocate a third of their investment to digital changes.
In other words, in addition to being both online and physical, retailers should also focus on digital changes and use digitalization in their physical stores. The best example of this is to collect and use data in the physical store, such as customer data in e-commerce. Whether it is a physical or online store, in this process it is necessary to use the data of data for their existence. This data offers retailers an opportunity to predict their customers’ interests and habits and keep the right campaign in front of them. In this way, they can reach them at the right place at the right place and with the right material through personal campaigns. A101 Marketing General Manager Cüneyt Sahin said that customers are avoiding transactions that will waste their time by accelerating the epidemic. Consumers do not like normal, non-extended expedition or discount information; Because it has become a waste of time for the general public to investigate all campaigns.
As poilabs, with our retail solutions, we enable retail vendors to collect and analyze the right data, use it and reach our customers with the right material at the right time.
