RETAIL NEWS: OMNI-CHANNEL
It’s time garden centres switch on to omni-channel retail By Adrian Parsons, Helix Australia and 160 Acres Group With consumer shopping habits changing and customers increasingly choosing to shop online, now is the time for garden centres to switch on to omni-channel retail. Retail marketing strategies have gone through significant change over the last 10 years as retailers across a range of categories clamour to ensure they have a strong online offer for their customers. Traditionally, Australian garden centres have focussed on delivering a compulsive in-store shopping experience. This has typically taken the form of stocking a wide range of quality plants, strong roadside signage and point-of-sale merchandising backed up by expert staff ready to provide advice and suggestions to the home gardener. The addition of cafes to garden centres has also been a successful strategy to lift revenues whilst providing a more enjoyable shopping experience for the consumer and inviting them to stay a little longer.
on online retail, a figure that represents 10.4% of the total retail trade and significantly a 19.5% increase on the previous year.
Whilst this broad generic marketing approach has held our industry in good stead for many years, now is the time for Australian retail garden centres to market their businesses online with professional and competitive online purchase options.
Trevor Cochrane, Managing Director of Guru Productions Pty Ltd, said their Garden Gurus television programme has seen a massive increase in web-based enquiries over the last six months. “In 2017 we had only 37 requests or links to on-line retailers that feature on our show. However, in the first six months of
An omni-channel retail strategy is an approach to sales and marketing that provides customers with a fully-integrated shopping experience by uniting user experiences from brick-and-mortar to mobile-browsing and everything in between.
Between March and May 2020 IBISWorld analysts reported an increase in online engagement across categories such as family lifestyle, personal care and nutrition and home and garden. Online search spikes for plants were up by 26% as more people aimed to improve their homes. The data suggests our industry’s core products, plants, seedlings, soil and pots, are ranking highly in online searches. It’s up to us to provide online purchase platforms that attract and convert customers into strong revenue sources for our nurseries.
The Australian online shopping industry has grown dramatically over the past five years. Rapid growth in internet and broadband penetration and consumer acceptance of electronic commerce as a viable and safe alternative to traditional instore retailing have aided online shopping. The National Australian Bank (NAB) online retail sales index April 2020 reported that that year Australians spent $34.27 billion 18
GROUNDSWELL SEPTEMBER 2020
2020 we have had over 200,000 enquiries to our online advertisers featuring plants and garden related products”. It would be folly for our industry to think that signage, stock and expert staff alone will ensure consumers get in their cars and visit our business to solve their plant needs. Especially in this unique moment, a time where people are increasingly nervous to leave their homes unless they have to. Big box retailers such as Bunnings were initially slow to embrace an omni-channel marketing approach but are making up ground quickly with their online presence. Online shopping giants Amazon entered the Australian market three years ago and is slowly taking up a significant portion of the market. Financial accounts filed with the Australian Securities and Investment Commission show Amazon’s Australian online store almost doubled its revenue from $292 million in 2018 to $562 million in 2019. Australia Post, which last year began trading from the southern hemisphere’s
