Myer is an Australian company which is into the retail business. It is a chain of retail departmental stores. It deals in a broad range of products including clothing (both men and women), footwear’s, accessories, fragrances, bedding, furniture, cosmetics, electrical & electronics equipment etc. It is Australia’s largest departmental store.
It was founded by Sidney Myer in 1899. It has a physical presence in all the Australian states. According to the CEO of Myer, all the stores of Myer are profitable.
Myer has made its online presence in the year 2007. It has started with launching an online gift store and slowly it diversified into all the products like clothing, electronics, perfume etc in its online retail model. Myer also launched an online shopping site called myfind.com in the year 2011. Later it was closed because of low website hits by customers. Now, Myer operates by the name of Mayer.com.au in the eCommerce market (Myer, 2015).
Online retail in Australia has continued to grow at a very high growth rate of more than 9% on year on year basis reaching to total revenue of $ 19 billion in 2015.
Traditionally, Myer has operated as a physical retail store for the last 116 years. Myer has been very successful in its traditional business model of offering products through physical stores. In 2007, Myers only launched an online gift store. It has not yet been able to fully utilise the potential of the E-commerce market. This is due to fierce competition like The Iconic, Catch of the Day, style runner, global giant like amazon Australia etc.
There are some limitations of physical retail stores. Although, consumers get the experience of buying goods personally the line/queue on physical stores can hamper their experience. Consumers can get the goods, i.e. they can place orders instantly without any wait in e-commerce and m-commerce. They can compare prices easily and it saves time to order products online. Although they cannot experience the product online before buying the customer has multiple options to buy the prom and they can buy products any time unlike the physical store (Chahar & Others, 2013).
The cost of operation for the online market is less as compared with the physical store. Although Myer has more than 300 physical stores, it can reduce its cost of operation by working on its online stores. It should do better marketing of its e-commerce website so as to promote the consumers to use the platform. Just having an online presence is not sufficient these days. The website should be able to attract consumers towards itself as opposed to its competitors. The capital requirement by Myer will be comparatively reduced for E-marketplace as compared with the physical stores. The issues of shelf space, location disadvantage, higher human resource cost etc can be overcome by online stores (Yang & Others, 2008). Myer can save a lot of operational costs by efficiently managing its online stores.
The profitability of Myer can be increased by moving effectively to modern retail formats as compared with its traditional method. It is important for traditional stores to have an online presence and m presence to avoid marketing myopia and to remain successful in business.
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