Sales Strategy

America’s Biggest Retailer Doesn’t Know Its Customers February 28, 2018 (0 comments)

Bentonville, AR--Walmart stock dropped 10% this week after the company reported its online sales grew only 23% in Q4 2017, after a 50% jump in the third quarter. But an article in VentureBeat suggests this isn't just the case of another company being bested by Amazon. After all, only a small percentage--about 4%--of Walmart's sales come from online. 

The author, Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora, says the problem is that Walmart is still focused on moving product. Sure, that's the goal of every retailer, but he says today's model for success is to pull, not push. Most consumers couldn't tell you what the last product they bought at Walmart was--nor could Walmart tell them, he says. But they can tell you what the last thing they bought from Amazon was, and if they can't, Amazon will remind them on their next visit.

"Walmart...has decades of institutional experience with supply chains, transport logistics, and inventory management. It knows how to buy and sell products. That worked fine for a long time. It doesn’t anymore.

In the old product model. You built a product, put it into as many channels as possible, and hoped there were customers waiting at the end of those channels. In the new service-based model, you start with the customer, understand their wants and needs, and then wrap your service around that customer via relevant channels. No more pushing units to strangers." Click here to read the full article.

Luckily, fine jewelers typically have excellent relationships with customers, so they don't have to worry the way Walmart does. But online is one area where jewelers can improve, and taking a leaf from Amazon's book ("people who bought this also liked this," or "based on your prior purchase of this, we think you might like these") is a very good place to start. For more tips on better e-commerce, log onto Centurion's new jewelryecomm.com site.