How Retailers Can Make Today’s Quick Shoppers Long-Term Customers

COVID-19 has radically changed consumer attitudes and behaviors, and these changes are very likely to persist long after the pandemic has passed. Furthermore, these impactful and relatively abrupt changes have added enormous stress to both online and brick-and-mortar retail businesses — although the changes are quite different. 

Onlien Retailers and Stress

For online retailers, stress has come mainly from a rapid and unexpected boom in business. As shoppers have become more worried about health and economic issues, they have turned to online shopping as never before, with forecasted e-commerce sales to increase a whopping 18% in 2020. Although growth is good, especially in a pandemic economy, the pressure is on e-commerce businesses to scale up and meet new and higher expectations of online customers.

Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

For brick-and-mortar retailers, the stress has been of a much more negative nature, as hardly needs to be said. Lockdowns were (and in some cases continue to be) crippling, and as businesses have reopened, they are faced with making sweeping changes to their entire shopping experience, from entering the store to checkout, and literally every cubic foot of space in between. 

The infographic below, Keeping Up With Quick Shoppers: A How-To Guide for Convenience and Safety, will help online, brick-and-mortar, and blended retail operations adapt to changing conditions and also thrive in the new Quick Shopper marketplace.

What exactly is driving all of these changes? As the infographic explains, consumers have shifted their thinking about value in response to the pandemic experience. Quality used to be the number one priority; today, it is availability.

This important change is no doubt due to the great difficulties everyone encountered in the early days of the COVID response, when people were scrambling, in most cases unsuccessfully, to obtain everything from toilet paper to disinfectant wipes to basic food items. Shortages have a deep and long-lasting effect. On top of that, consumers now have serious health concerns making them fearful of entering a retail store, or any other public space, unless they are confident that it is safe. 

Shopping safely in the store

Key elements of safe in-store shopping are speed, product availability, cleanliness, and limited human contact. The infographic provides many detailed tips on how retailers can adapt their operations to accommodate these requirements and attract new and old customers. 

The good news for brick-and-mortar retailers is that many of the changes being driven by the Quick Shopper will be good for business when health concerns subside and the economy starts rolling again. For instance, low-touch or no-touch payment technologies are sure to be appreciated by consumers under any circumstances.

Likewise, reliable product availability, drive-through shopping, and home delivery are also appealing options for the long term. Even though it has taken a crisis to drive some of these changes, making them now will help lay the foundation for a strong retail sector in the years to come.

For transformative retail ideas, please review the infographic now.

Infographic created by First Data, an enterprise payment solutions company