Popular online shopping site Zalora is up to something new: and it has nothing to do with online this time. It has to do with brick and mortar shop instead.
As reported by Wall Street Journal, Zalora has just opened a physical pop-up store at ION Orchard. According to regional managing director Tito Costa, Zalora’s store is designed to increase awareness of the site among local consumers.
“The idea is you can go in, touch and feel the products, try them on, and buy from the store.”
The official Zalora Shop website also states that it has opened its doors on the 16th of October at ION Orchard basement 2, next to ZARA. Our friends over at Coconuts Singapore also spotted the news earlier in October.
Online To Offline Experience
While Tito told Wall Street Journal that the physical store for an online retailer is first of its kind in the region, several other retailers have also invested into an online to offline experience, especially daily deals site such as Groupon Singapore.
Online-to-offline is a strategy many e-commerce companies leverage on to complete the customer experience. One of the many qualms from online customers is that they are unable to physically test out the products before they place their orders, resulting in a different product expectations as well as high return rates. Other than Groupon Singapore, DealGuru, which runs Deal.com.sg, also has a physical shop to complement their online experience as well as to act as an item collection point.
Other than that, we also covered Naiise, a design centric local online shopping site that has also organized multiple pop-up stores in Singapore.
In China, popular Internet giant Alibaba has also invested in a local department store operator to enhance its online-to-offline customer experience.
Vulcan Post will be checking out the official launch of the physical Pop-up store at ION Orchard so do check back again for updates!