business intelligence ecommerce

True luxury is IRL E-commerce is great for a lot of things — snagging sales, stocking up on staples, buying stupid stuff we really do not need. But people’s voracious appetite for online shopping does appear to have its limits, specifically when it comes to luxury. The expectation has long been that e-commerce would revolutionize luxury, just as it has so much of retail. It killed many malls and bookstores; it made Walmart go digital; it transformed shipment and logistics operations across the globe. So why wouldn’t it disrupt such an expensive, lucrative space? It turns out we still like to buy the nicest, most expensive items in real life, in large part because we want a luxury experience when we spend the big bucks. We like to feel fancy when we shop fancy, and dropping stuff into a virtual cart on a random website in between meetings is far from most people’s definition of fancy. A recent survey from Morning Consult, a business intelligence company, explored how consumers look at luxury. It found that people generally have a strong preference for a brick-and-mortar experience when buying luxury items. Of those surveyed, 49% said they would consider buying luxury clothing or shoes from a brick-and-mortar store and 48% said the same of jewelry and watches. Thirty-nine percent said they would consider buying handbags and 40% said they would consider buying cosmetics and fragrances in a store. In every category, under 20% of consumers said they would consider making those purchases online. Gen Z was slightly more open to e-commerce and less interested in the brick-and-mortar experience, but not always by a meaningful margin. Less than 10% of all consumers said they’d buy luxury products through social media, though that number got up to the high teens for Gen Z. Consumers also said customer service was the second-most-important attribute in defining luxury shopping, right behind the quality of the product. In other words, they don’t just want to buy something special — they want to be treated special while they do it. “The No. 1 reason people like to shop in stores is because they want that experience of browsing and touching things and playing with things,” Claire Tassin, a retail and e-commerce analyst at Morning Consult, said. “Customer service, especially in a luxury environment, is such a big part of how you justify the additional expense.” Online luxury sales picked up during the pandemic but have since come back down to earth. Some important names in the fashion e-commerce space, such as Matches Fashion and Farfetch, have cratered. The German-based platform Mytheresa is doing OK — its net sales grew by 18% in the quarter ending in March — but its stock is still down by more than 80% from its IPO price in January 2021. The private companies Moda Operandi and Ssense seem to be selling merchandise and retaining customers, experts say, but the sites have a niche appeal, so that’s hardly made a dent. The overarching theme is that many consumers haven’t warmed up to shopping luxury — namely, ultra-luxe items and brands — online. We try to treat luxury with the same e-commerce experience we use for paper towels, and that just doesn’t work. Jason Goldberg, the chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing firm, said the jury is still out on whether e-commerce will ever take over luxury retail, but for now, there aren’t great examples of “runaway successes” in the space. There’s no single answer as to why. One reasonable hypothesis could be that people simply prefer to get high-consideration and high-priced items in store, he said. What they get out of a luxury in-store experience hasn’t been translated online. “We try to treat luxury with the same e-commerce experience we use for paper towels, and that just doesn’t work,” Goldberg said. “In general, online, we have gotten very, very good at needs-fulfillment buying, but we are sucky at discovery. Nobody goes to Amazon because they go, ‘I’m just in the mood to treat myself.’” When unplanned purchases happen online, they tend to happen through social discovery. You see something on Instagram or TikTok and then you buy it. Those types of impulse purchases are fine to make with a few clicks, but when people spend the big bucks, they want to feel a little pampered. “It is fair to say that going to a luxury store is part of the pleasure of buying a luxury product,” said Luca Solca, a senior analyst covering global luxury goods at Bernstein. “Buying online is convenient and fast. But buying in store is a pleasure.” An analysis from Bain & Company found that the share of luxury goods sold online fell to 20% in 2023, after hitting 22% in 2020 and 2021. Solca believes 20% is on the high side and said that on average, the percentage of online sales in the luxury market hovers around the mid-teens, and sometimes even lower, noting that Burberry recently told him they were at 9%. For the most part, luxury brands prefer that customers would rather shop in-store. Sure, they all have some kind of online presence — it is 2024 after all — but not all of their products are always available online, and the internet is far from the primary area of focus. For the most high-end products, there can even be waiting lists. The general aversion to e-commerce makes sense: One way to convince people you’re selling a luxury item, and price it accordingly, is to make it scarce and elusive, on top of providing the in-store luxury experience. It helps companies create and keep an aura around their brands. “Luxury brands historically have actually stayed away from being very strong in the online channel, largely to do with the fact that they didn’t want to be a cheap marketplace,” said Nora Kleinewillinghoefer, a partner in the consumer and retail practice at Kearney, a strategy and management-consulting firm. “For them, it’s about the storytelling.” Business …

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