E-commerce v Retail: 

For all its enduring hype — physical versus digital, offline versus on — the old war is over. In fact, it’s always been a lie. Choice, not location, is commerce’s greatest opportunity and its most-looming threat.

In defense of retail’s “apocalypse,” brick-and-mortar losses are mounting; the four-year bankruptcy count now sits at 57 once-landmark chains. Manufacturing market share and in-store sales for consumer packaged goods are flat or declining. Born-online “microbrands” have devoured the lion’s share of growth. And ecommerce’s gains continue to trounce retail as a whole.

Here’s the uncomfortable twist: brick-and-mortar still dominates online sales by over $20 trillion. And the gap will widen. After a quarter century, ecommerce’s spread is slowing, 80% of 2018’s gains belonged to Amazon, and (in the U.S.) the top five online retailers own 64.7% of sales:

The brands that are winning,” says Fab Dolan, Head of Marketing at Google Canada, “are the ones that understand and own the fundamental interplay between experiential and transactional. If we were to believe that retail is dead, then we should be spending all of our money doing online ads and guiding people to our website. And yet, what we’re seeing time and time again is that building anticipation and an appreciation for the magic of our products happens in the real world even though most people buy online or through call centers.

“Will retail look fundamentally different and maybe unrecognizable in ten years? Yeah. But it’ll always depend on how you navigate the interplay between offline and online worlds, how you — the brand — interlock customers and products.”

The future belongs neither to legacy giants nor pure-play ecommerce. Instead, it belongs to direct-to-consumer (DTC) models, often referred to as digitally native vertical brands (DNVB). Just don’t let the name fool you.

Read more:https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/the-future-of-ecommerce