Real World vs Online

I was recently asked: “Do you see online shopping and e-commerce killing real-world retailing” and my response was “who cares, let’s talk about me”.

Let me explain. I’m not a retailer. I don’t manufacture clothing or computers and I don’t market or sell things. I don’t really understand the business of manufacturing and selling and I don’t want to. I’m a guy who likes to buy sports coats, pizza, cool plastic robots, shoes and electronic gadgets. I really like the experience of buying those things and it’s my experience as a consumer that I expect retailers to obsess over – not online vs. offline.

I think I mentioned I like pizza. I like the pizzas from a certain pizza chain that has geometric shapes on its boxes and I go through the same process each time I order one of their pizzas. I use a desktop PC to find a pizza discount voucher – they appear, like messengers of greasy goodness, in my inbox each Friday and if it’s not there I search for one on the web. Said pizza chain allows me to order online, and I’m already at my PC, but the desktop web ordering experience is poor: too many “side dish” promotions, too many ads, too many choices. Too hard.

So I use the pizza chain’s mobile app – it’s simple, has fewer ads, less clutter and is much easier to use that their website. I wait 5 minutes, then drive to the store to collect my pizzas – it’s the only way to guarantee those steaming circular beauties are mouth blisteringly hot when I eat them with my family. When I get to the store they have a screen displaying the orders currently being processed and their remaining time from preparation, through the oven and to the counter.

Though I started the experience at my desktop, and could’ve ordered then and there, I moved to mobile web because the experience was better. I’ll take hostages before I take a luke-warm pizza home so that means I drive to a real-world shop to close the pizza loop.

So let’s recap. To get my pizza I used desktop web and mobile web, visited a real-world shop and was advised by their electronic screens as to the readiness of my order. At each point of the process I voted for the best user experience. At each point of the process I elected to use the mechanism that made me feel most confident I’d get what I wanted. At no stage of the process did I give a second’s thought to which part of my experience was virtual or “real” or whether e-commerce would kill “real-world” - I just want cheap, hot pizza on my table.

The lesson, from my pizza story, to retailers pondering a proposed title-fight between online shopping and real-world retailing? It’s not “either” or “or”, but “and”. As a consumer I’ll continue to use all the channels available to me, sometimes at the same time. If you want to keep me as a customer then make sure you’re worried about the experience I have with your brand, product or service.

Make sure the customer experiences you design for me are specific to my point of interaction. That’ll make me happy and loyal. And if you want to make me deliriously happy I’d like a hot pizza with meat in the shape of robots that comes with a sport-coat and discount voucher I can use anywhere.