Blog: How digital and physical worlds have collided in 2013

Convergence has been the watchword of 2013. In the past 12 months that has manifested itself in how the digital and physical retail worlds have collided as technology is embraced within shopping centres and stores.

But when I chaired a conference session for Retail Week sister event World Retail Congress recently, I was also struck by the fact that the very same issues of convergence dominated discussion in the arena of payment systems. So despite property and payments representing two completely different worlds, they were wrestling with extraordinarily similar issues.

I am sure there are dozens more examples, but the same scenario raised its head at an even more recent debate on ecommerce retail logistics and real estate. Sheds and stores may rarely have been considered common bedfellows, yet the future strategies around logistics suggest that the lines are blurring even in this field.

Discussing the optimum future of large distribution sheds, a number of experts predicted that landlords would increasingly be overseeing multiple retail tenants and that they would need to learn to become more adept at liaising with their tenants, understanding their business needs and adopting higher degrees of flexibility and customer service. They could easily have been talking about shopping centres.

On the flip side, a number of retailers were discussing the way their stores played a part in their hub and spoke logistics strategies, with several looking to increase the storage space within key stores, which in turn would be used to feed smaller stores in the chain as part of the process of speeding up delivery to customers. They could easily have been talking about distribution centres.

Clearly, what constitutes retailing and what constitutes logistics is becoming harder to define. And I thought I was confused enough already.

What all such conversations illustrate is just how fundamentally the retail arena is changing as ecommerce becomes embedded in our everyday lives. In response, retailers and landlords are realigning how they adopt and embrace the opportunities and that means that many of the fixed channels are becoming blurred at the edges and, as they do, many of the fixed ways the industry had of doing things are altering as well.

Argos is a prime example. Having recently opened the first of its digital-concept stores the general merchandise retailer is offering to fulfil across a range of channels and has proffered its estate as a delivery platform for eBay. The company is overtly and strenuously dedicated to its extensive property portfolio but has put the blending and converging of channels at the heart of its turnaround strategy.

And perhaps that’s what we should take from 2013 – it’s time to stop trying to compartmentalise disciplines and to embrace the confusing, challenging and ever-changing converged world in which we are working.