The Evolution Of Retail And The On-Demand Future
The retail industry has bore witness to a long and kaleidoscopic history stretching across the millennia back to ancient times. With evidence pointing to the first primitive shops appearing some eight thousand years ago in Iran, retail today has evolved into quite a different beast.
How has retail changed since then?
A (not very) brief sketch of retail history
The retail journey can be separated into several stages:
Awareness: When the customer is made aware of a brand.
Consideration: When the customer evaluates a product.
Purchase: When the customer buys the product.
Fulfilment: How the product is handed over to the customer (over a counter or delivered, for example).
In its earliest forms, retailing looked less like shopfronts and more like makeshift mats and pop up booths. As civilisations developed and cities grew, these improvised affairs morphed into open marketplaces and trading forums like those of ancient Rome.
Until around the 17th Century, though, when permanent storefronts with regular trading hours became more commonplace, commerce mostly took place either directly with tradesmen, or in variations of marketplaces like the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul or Chester Rows of England. At this stage, there is some level of branding, and customers would browse the goods on offer, then purchase on the spot.
As the settings of commerce evolved, so did the ways in which merchants and consumers interact.
In-store retail changed significantly between the 17th and 19th Centuries: features more familiar to modern stores such as display windows, changing rooms, and the service counter were developed. And around the late 18th Century, multi-merchant retail complexes known as shopping arcades, such as the Palais-Royal, in Paris, started emerging. A predecessor to the shopping mall, these complexes housed cafes, reading rooms, theatres and salons in addition to shopfronts and were described as:
“World[s] in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.”
Illustrated Guide to Paris of 1852
The concept of putting under one roof everything that a consumer might desire was crystallised in the appearance of department stores around mid 19th Century (Harrods opened in 1834!), and shopping malls in the 20th Century. This not only solidified a transition from independent, mom-and-pop shops into large department stores and the still larger shopping malls, but also a major shift in retailing in offering an experience, a journey of convenience, leisure, and luxury.
“Excite the mind, and the hand will reach for the pocket.”
Harry Gordon Selfridge, Selfridges Founder
Retail and the digital age
Rapid technological advancements in the 20th Century brought about an array of novel retail strategies to drive awareness and create new shopping experiences (think the radio and television). Up until the 1990s, however — with the exception of a few merchants offering mailing options via phone — browsing and purchasing of products largely took place in-store.
Then, the internet came around.
The World Wide Web was released for public use in 1991 — and in the mere twenty odd years since its commercialisation, the retail landscape has undergone dramatic transformations.
Until the 1990s, one thing about retail remained consistent: the dominance of physical, brick and mortar retail.
But the rise of the internet meant that merchants could now do away entirely with the need for a physical storefront and operate as pure play e-commerce agents (both Amazon and eBay launched in 1995!).
Instead of having a physical location to display their goods, e-commerce players would keep their stock in warehouses. Customers would browse through a website, purchase through online payments and have their orders fulfilled through deliveries or click & collect options.
With the advent of the internet, retail no longer needed to stay just brick and mortar
The on-demand future
The popularity of digital retail exploded with the widespread adoption of smartphones in the 2000s, which meant consumers were always connected and able to shop. (Online retail in the UK alone amounted to over £60 billion in 2016, and according to this research, some 70–80% of all online browsing took place through a mobile device).
But the convenience enabled by the smartphone and digital innovations also fanned the expectation for convenience in other areas of life. If you want to listen to a song, it’s a tap away. If you want to hail a cab, it’s just at a distance of a click. Whatever you want, you want it instantly, and conveniently.
In the digital age, the last piece of the retail puzzle lies in the fulfilment stage — once you’ve centralised all your products into the digitised mall, how do you actually hand the products over to your customers?
For pure e-commerce players and those brick and mortar retailers who want to get a piece of the digital pie, it means being able to offer customers rapid and flexible deliveries for their orders. It means getting your goods to where your customers want it, when they want it.
With the Quiqdash web-app to enable SMEs to instantly request or schedule our Quiqees to make a delivery, and the Quiqup API for larger enterprises to inject on-demand logistics into their e-commerce platform — we here at Quiqup are working to facilitate the evolution of retail into an on-demand future.
From ancient makeshift stalls to trading forums, to department stores and digital markets — a pattern can be seen where the retail model moved to make it easier and easier for consumers to get anything that they might possibly want or need.
Before the digital age, the highpoint of convenience in retail was to centralise merchants to a complex such as the department store. Today, the entire retail journey could be distilled into a screen. On-demand logistics is the last piece of the puzzle — because, at the end of the day, what can be easier than shopping to your heart’s content from the comfort of your home?
Tim, Business Content Writer
