---
title: "Have You Really Seen the Absolute Advantages of Physical Stores?"
description: "Physical stores are often criticized for limited product display, high costs, low efficiency, and lack of customer stickiness. However, these criticisms may be one-sided, as physical stores have inherent advantages such as experiential shopping, higher cross-selling rates, and instant gratification. To thrive, physical retailers need to adopt online strategies like personalized service, enticing promotions, and an omnichannel approach."
author: "联商网"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2016-11-27"
language: "en"
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# Have You Really Seen the Absolute Advantages of Physical Stores?

> Physical stores are often criticized for limited product display, high costs, low efficiency, and lack of customer stickiness. However, these criticisms may be one-sided, as physical stores have inherent advantages such as experiential shopping, higher cross-selling rates, and instant gratification. To thrive, physical retailers need to adopt online strategies like personalized service, enticing promotions, and an omnichannel approach.

**Physical stores are often criticized for the following points:**
First and foremost, **limited product display** – the size of the store determines how many products can be displayed, and with business hours, customers can't browse after closing.
Secondly, **high costs and low efficiency** – many business owners still use paper to record member orders, reducing operational efficiency.
Finally, **lack of customer stickiness and higher costs** – once customers leave, it's hard to maintain the relationship.
However, is it a bit one-sided to judge the future of physical stores based on these few points? Physical stores have inherent absolute advantages!

**Absolute Advantages of Physical Stores:**
> 1. Experience – "Only in the mouth, not in the hand"
The lighting, decor, touch, and smell of a physical store cannot be replaced by images. Whether it's trying on a small accessory or testing a large appliance, customers at least have a sense of certainty before buying. More importantly, there are professional salespeople to explain and boost purchase desire.
> 2. Cross-selling rate – "If it tastes good, eat more"
When shopping offline, don't you often buy more than you originally planned? Maybe you discover a need while browsing, or a promotional price tempts you, or even because others are grabbing it and you join in. So, the cross-selling rate in physical stores is generally much higher.
Buying clothes and pairing them with a necklace, or buying cosmetics and picking up cotton pads are common. You see e-commerce sales soaring, but have you calculated their average order value and profitability?
> 3. Instant gratification – "Come into the bowl quickly!"
Online, the fastest is next-day delivery via SF Express. In a physical store, you can own it immediately after swiping your card, without waiting a second! This is the difference in shopping experience, especially in urgent situations where only offline stores are an option.

So the question is, **since physical stores are not inferior to online stores, why is everyone pessimistic? A large part is because many business owners stick to old methods, waiting passively for customers like "waiting for rabbits by a tree stump."**
Online store owners are tirelessly researching, learning, and spending on promotion. As a physical retailer, you also need to take the initiative and put in the same effort and thought as online store owners. Then the balance will naturally be restored.

**You need to learn three skills from online stores:**
> Skill 1 – Service! Service! Service! Important things said three times!
>
>
>
What is the best part of online store service?
Is it calling customers "dear"? No! **Frankly, that's basic service any business can provide, whether online or offline.**
Is it "professionalism"? No! **You should know that the professionalism of physical store salespeople is absolutely unmatched by online customer service.**
A simple example: when buying clothes, if you ask the online customer service if they have your size, they can only send a size chart and repeatedly emphasize that there may be errors, and ask not to give a bad review if the size doesn't fit. But many physical store salespeople can just look at you and hand you the right size to try on. That's the difference in service experience due to professionalism.
So what aspect of online service is worth learning? It's understanding the customer. If you've used online customer service software, you know that when you type "hello," the customer service already knows your basic information, what you've viewed or purchased before.
**So communication is seamless, tailored to the individual, and the chance of closing a deal doubles. In contrast, how many physical store salespeople know their returning customers well?**
Of course, online stores have an inherent advantage because data is automatically presented without needing to memorize. So why don't physical stores adopt a similar approach to maintain customer relationships?
For example, **let each salesperson use their professionalism to gain the trust of in-store customers (honestly, this is easier than gaining trust online), then use a public account to add customers on WeChat, maintain communication regularly, enhance customer stickiness and loyalty, and record each customer's information for gradual improvement and follow-up.**
Additionally, if you don't have developers, there are many lightweight apps on the market, like ShopEx's Pengke, which uses enterprise WeChat to assign each salesperson a unique QR code. When customers scan it, they follow the enterprise public account and are bound to that salesperson, enjoying 24-hour trusted butler-style exclusive service.
**Salespeople can also improve the customer profile (tags, information, shopping attributes, etc.) through continuous communication, and this data is uniformly transmitted to the enterprise backend for unified management.**

> Skill 2 – Tempt customers, give them a reason to visit the store!
Regarding marketing tactics, some might say physical stores lose because their methods are too monotonous – besides single-item discounts and store-wide reductions, they can't find other plays. Unlike online H5 games that are engaging.
To that, I want to say, "Ha!" Haven't you seen richer and more direct activities? For example, partnering with amusement parks to give a free carousel ride for a certain purchase amount, or treasure hunts in ball pits with gifts, or collaborations with cinemas where meal tickets get movie or KTV discounts.
These not only give adults discounts but also let kids have fun, which online activities cannot achieve.
The problem is that physical stores lose in promotion methods and channels – customers only know about store events if they happen to pass by or see a flyer in the mail. Especially with low foot traffic, it's even harder to reach customers.
So to "tempt customers" to come offline, we can use online promotion methods, like using software to edit the event and have salespeople forward it to their "fan groups" or share it on their Moments to spread the word and attract more people to the store.

> Skill 3 – Going with the flow is better than resisting.
When physical stores are thinking about reform, online stores are opening physical locations, like Inman and Green Box. Why? On one hand, online sales have hit a bottleneck – price wars are no longer sustainable. On the other hand, doesn't it prove that physical stores have their own advantages?
So, why not open an online flagship store to expand sales channels? If you don't want to invest too much initially, you can simply open a WeChat store, placed in your public account, to add an online purchase channel. Later, as you grow, you can consider a full PC brand website to expand brand awareness.
Then, integrate online and offline to improve overall revenue. This can be done by having salespeople send online products to their fan groups, and when fans make a purchase, it counts as the salesperson's performance. This greatly boosts salesperson motivation and doubles business performance, truly breaking the online-offline barrier and achieving integrated management.

**Source: Supermarket People's Home**
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