Not every company can be saved and transferred to the digital world, explains e-commerce specialist Alexander Graf in the ntv podcast “So techt Germany”. But there are many other opportunities. “Click & Collect” is not a good strategy, however.
Alexander Graf has a retail motto: “Innovate or die” – reinvent yourself or die. Basically, it has been shown that companies win that are always able to reinvent themselves. “The companies that prefer to stand still and paint a lot of Powerpoints about their strategies that lose against Amazon,” says Graf in the ntv podcast “So techt Germany”.
Amazon also has to be innovative and if they stop, others can pass by. “The chance now exists with the new management,” says Graf, half jokingly and half seriously. The e-commerce specialist has worked for companies such as About You and Etribes and, in 2014, co-founded Spryker, a company that has successfully developed online retail software.
Most companies in Germany would make too little of the opportunities that arise. The pandemic showed that companies that were already well positioned had better come through the crisis. Graf does not see “Click & Collect” as a sensible strategy, for example. Picking up headphones from Mediamarkt that you put in your shopping cart beforehand – “That combines the worst of both worlds: I can’t touch them beforehand and I also have to drive them myself,” explains Graf. On the other hand, there are also companies that have charged “Click & Collect” customers with a “penalty fee”, criticizes Graf and refers to Ikea. The argument of the Swedes for an additional fee was “a bit absurd”, but in the meantime Ikea had recognized the problem and “we are now really stepping on the gas,” says Graf.
“You can’t pay rent from this”
In his opinion, Click & Collect and other strategies are not suitable strategies to save yourself. All the work is somewhere in the interfaces between analog and online business. “In the last 15 years there has never been a case where a company has managed to regain market share against pure online companies,” explains Graf. Large companies, especially large niche category leaders, would have to become platforms themselves. The expert does not see an alternative. Old trading models, where traders bought goods cheaply, put them in the warehouse and sold them on to customers at high prices, “can no longer be operated profitably in a digital world. You can no longer pay rent and service staff with this,” explains Graf, referring to the Inner cities.
In this episode of “So techt Germany”, Alexander Graf explains what retailers can do now and how they can adapt to the digital world.
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