In the last few days, the world has turned upside down for many retailers and especially, of course, for all retailers who primarily generate their sales in the stationary sector. More or less from one day to the next, almost 100% of the turnover is lost, but the costs remain for the time being.

Even if many dealers now switch to short-time working and possibly can arrange deferments or even rent payment waivers with property owners, many industries have the problem of inventory. Seasonal items (fashion) or goods that quickly lose value (consumer electronics) are just two possible scenarios here, where the aim is now to quickly sell off stocks in order to build up as large a cash cushion as possible. It cannot be assumed that the current situation will be resolved within a few weeks and regardless of whether it is valid for 2 or 6 months, for many it is a matter of bare existence.

This is where a business model that had actually already been declared dead comes back onto the stage: the shopping club. In your own online shop, you probably can’t cut prices in half that easily because of agreements with manufacturers or other reasons. Within a closed user group in an online shop, which may only be open for a few months, you can quickly start a sale without complex processes and usually without major sanctions on the part of the brand manufacturer.

Let’s take the example of a mid-sized textile retail chain that has 40 brick-and-mortar stores that are now affected by the shutdown. Most employees can be put on short-time work and rents are deferred or partially waived. Now it’s all about turning those full warehouse shelves into cash quickly and getting as much room to breathe as possible.

Assortment & Offers

These items may be transitioned into the retailer’s normal 10% discount campaigns following the sales promotion at the club.

Procedure & systematics of the “Club”

As I have already described in detail, the offers are only accessible to registered users. A promotion has a fixed duration, e.g. 4 weeks. However, the goods will not be shipped until the end of the sale and within 4 weeks. This procedure offers the advantage that the enterprise resource planning does not have to be connected in an MVP phase. This approach also facilitates logistics and customer care handling. In addition, it is possible to define a “minimum sales quantity” for a promotion. Only when this quantity is reached does the “sale” occur. For example, you offer an Adidas sneaker for a price 20% below market price. However, the “sale” only happens when at least 500 customers order the sneaker. With this strategy, you create additional “social shopping” components for promotions that can drive sales.

Product data maintenance, prices & availability

Each promotion is to be advertised in the form of an individually designed, but predefined shopping world based on 3-5 “templates”. The retailer either enters his 30 to 50 products manually in the backend or uploads a csv with the data. If necessary, he shoots photos with his smartphone and assigns some attributes. In general, the shop solution manually defines how many items can be sold from a promotion, and the gross sales price is also defined here. An exchange of product data, prices and availabilities with a connected merchandise management system will not take place. Inventory management within the promotion quota defined manually in the shop takes place in the shop.

Payment, Shipping & Logistics

Due to the already described fast MVP approach regarding shipping and orders, the collected orders at the end of a campaign are simply downloaded as CSV export from the shop and imported manually or via CSV import into your shipping solution. Payment has already been secured in the shop, so it’s just a matter of managing the shipping process.

Marketing

The key factor that defines the success of this short-term immediate action is to generate sales as quickly as possible.
How can retailers attract customers to your shopping club quickly and in sufficient quantity?

Many retailers already maintain Facebook and Instagram accounts – they use these to reach their regular customers and, if applicable, invite them to explore the new shopping club with a coupon. It’s an opportunity for many merchants now to finally collect data from their own customers, as they won’t let customers into the club until the customer leaves the email and agrees to receive emails in the future. The prices have to be so radical that the offer will be spread virally through social media by customers. In addition, our sister company, the KlickPiloten (Google Premier Partner and Facebook Marketing Partner) can support you so that you can achieve your first successes within a few days:

Budget estimation and time schedule project realization