As seen on The Toronto Star.
At the base of Canadian Tire Corp. headquarters on Yonge St. near Eglinton Ave., a small, chic experiment is taking place.
Humble products, including baseball caps and cotton T-shirts, toques and hoodies, branded North Point, hang like designer wear off elegant racks in a small concept store being tested. The atmosphere is spare and white and bright.
It’s not just a different look for the retailer, which also runs more workmanlike Mark’s stores. Beside the wall of sneakers and shoes at the concept store is a tablet, where customers can swipe to find the shoe they want, to see whether it is in stock in their size, and have a sales associate bring it out of the storeroom to try.
In the store’s change room, another tablet. A shopper with an armful of products to try on can order a different size or colour, or a different product altogether — perhaps a pair of shoes suggested by the interactive tablet — without having to poke their head out of the room, flag down an associate and wait while the associate searches the floor and returns.
The setup allows staff to respond more efficiently and customers get speedier service — having the tablet in the change room reduces the amount of time it takes to retrieve new items from six minutes or more to just 45 seconds, according to David Dougherty, president, Kinetic Commerce, the Toronto company behind the system at the North Point store.
Retailers have spent the last decade getting their wares online. Now they are bringing their online game into stores, in the hope of selling more, and using smaller, less expensive chunks of real estate.
It’s sometimes called “endless aisle,” and while Canadian Tire is testing the concept, the Kinetic platform is already at shoe retailer Aldo, which has installed interactive screens in 600 stores worldwide, according to Dougherty.
Bringing the online experience into stores is also the cornerstone of Tulip Retail, based in Toronto and headed by Ali Asaria, who founded well.ca, a health and beauty retailer.
“A lot of the biggest retailers we work with are opening up smaller footprint stores with less inventory in them,” said Asaria.
“They want those stores to be able to sell every product that they have, even if they are not available in the store.”
That’s where hand-held devices come in.
Tulip Retail arms sales associates with a tablet or iPhone or iPod Touch, allowing them to offer more and better advice to customers, including a wider range of products or specific advice based on their past experiences, and added a financial incentive to encourage associates to use them.
“There was never an incentive for a store associate to sell an online product, because they weren’t getting credit or commission for those sales,” said Asaria.
“We bring all that inventory to every store associate and customer, so they can access all of the inventory online and in store. Also, we find a way to credit that store or the store associate with the commission on that.”
He said some retailers have boosted sales by as much as 10 per cent using the system.
“A lot of Tulip is about reinventing stores but also reinventing store associates in a post e-commerce, post-mobile world,” says Asaria, whose clients include Indigo, Lululemon Athletica, Coach and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Both Canadian Tire and Aldo declined to talk about their initiatives.
Ninety per cent of retail sales are still made in stores, according to a 2018 global retail report by Deloitte consultants. The same report also points to a 2016 report that found that digital interactions influenced 56 cents of every dollar spent in bricks-and-mortar stores. So it seems to make sense to join the two.
“What retailers are trying to do today is bring elements of that digital experience and make it come to life in a physical store,” said Thomas F. Quinn, national retail and wholesale distribution leader, Deloitte consultants.
The first attempts to bring online shopping into stores — plopping computers on the sales floor and having consumers look products up themselves — proved too cumbersome to catch on, said Quinn. Putting the computing power in the hands of store associates is a way to make it work more seamlessly.
