Pop Up Stores In Australia And The Growth Of Alibaba.com Pop Up Retail

Discussion

Pop up stores is strategically offering commercial proposition with an incredible area of growth in the paradigm of online retail. The study shows that there increasing growth of pop up stores in Australia with the growing demand from the customers for these stores. Therefore, the study focuses on a pop-up shopping method that has now turned in to a new tradition allowing designers and retailer to be in control of their own supply network. The online pop up retailing stores is providing the Australian designers with a futile interface without any restriction to make it an overseas one. Based on these, factors of pop up retaining in Australia, the essay focuses on the growth of Alibaba.com pop up retail by discussing the classified stages of pop up retail. Moreover, the essay discusses the major decision that is to be taken and activities that are integrated into the stages of planning pop up activity.

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Discussion

Pop up retail is a temporary retailed setting that is usually framed to facilitate a direct customer-brand interaction for a specific period of time. This type of pop-up retail stores often comes up with an explicit promotional or an interactive purpose. However, the use of pop up retailed stores has an effective intention to facilitate growth for the retailed organisation. In this context, these pop-up stores come from the theory of the retail store environment, customer experience maintenance and event management. These short terms business starts out making an impermanent present within high streets all as shopping centres in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney (Alexander et al. 2018). These stores are increasingly reactivating laneways by migrating into suburbs across the country.

Research in this context has found that there are almost 23,000 people who are employed in developing pop-up stores. In Australia, the pop-up store adds almost 2.6billion to the economy each year. According to the estimation of business research in the 12 months, the industry will be growing by nearly 8.4% (Overdiek, 2017). On the contrary,  The Brisbane Times has reported that pop up stores in Australia extremely appeals to the retailers as they offer flexible options for promoting the products that easier to achieve in other countries, retailers in Australia have a significant option to choose either a short-term lease or a one-off option for a festival (Bonetti and Perry. 2017).

However, pop up shops are highly adaptable in nature and has the capability to operate within a diverse range of network across location. Amongst this one of the most popular pop store channel are shipping reserves that can be used by the retailers if they are not able to sustain the security of fixed real estate. These stores are weatherproof in nature durable as well as transformable that adds extra appeal to the containers that cost only $5000 provided with a rent.

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In this regards, Alibaba hosted apartment style interest characterising start integrated process. The stores represented their renovated retail model that showcased both online and offline stores. According to the news report the stores tried to entice the domestic merchants for implementing technology with their own e-commerce interface for driving improved Omni channels from the retailers (Kwon and Brinthaupt, 2015). The stores set up in Sydney popup followed by a similar store in Melbourne’s. According to reports, Chinese migrants were also able to shop at his location. For this reason, these stores have not been open to wide are and opened only for a short period of time.

Strategic objectives

In this context, emerging designers in Australia along online retail stores are increasingly involved in opening experiential pop up retails stores with the delivery of informed and positive service to their customers. There are several stages of pop up retail stores:

Strategic objectives

At the very beginning of the launch of the pop up retailed store, Alibaba.com had to go through the ideas of experimentation to set down the strategic objectives. In this stage of beginning, the brand took the opportunity to examine their products if they are properly received by the potential customers (Davis et al. 2015). This step gives the online retail the opportunity to offer the type of flexibility that is required to be tested in a different location.

In this context, since stores start becoming the crucial point of the customers, these become a huge opportunity to work out on the concept and variety of the brand. Apart from customer-oriented strategy, a pop-up fashion brand takes hold of the moment to set an industry by inviting the wholesale customers to explore the all-new collection as a distributive part of the strategy (Fredericks et al. 2015).

Pre-pop-up

After gaining the initial validation of the location, online retail pop up store Alibaba started launching the new collection and developing their customer base as a part of pre-pop up. In this stage a launch event pop up is conducted by the retailer for a limited time, this help to create a lot of buzz amongst the customers (Cummins, 2014). By amplifying press event in the store the organisation manage to expand the coverage of the new collection for the target population.

Actual pop-up experience

Actual pop up experience starts when the brand has managed to cover the various publications and have speeded customers over all the social locations. Therefore, the retailed brand at this stage typically opens up a pop up in the duration for 6 to 10 months (Jensen et al. 2015). Along with the development of long-term pop-up store, Alibaba.com took time to get engaged with a broader customer base in Australia and developed a brand loyalty. In this con6ext, the major aim of the organisation was to offer the customers with a memorable experienced that customers desired for (Powell, 2018). This stage in more than just showcasing the store with an incredible collection but the purpose in this stage is to involve all the different senses and allow the customers to communicate with products of the retailer stores.

Alibaba.com has a vision for the growing the future if retail. Therefore, through the starting of the popup store the retail store set an objective to facilitate its vision to ruse beyond e-commerce other than building the store of digital service. The company successfully grabbed the opportunity to get involved with the emerging markets as well as customers through the pop up retailed. They developed the set-up of apartment-style stories in Australia for the first time by engaging a large number of customers (Williams, 2016). The store has been featured with technologies representing the future of online and offline shopping, the location operated for less than a week. The stores featured AI mirrors as well as virtual interface along with cloud capable technologies. All the products in the pop up set up had QR codes that had to be scanned from the Alibaba’s app website that is linked with online products (Powell, 2018).

Pre-pop-up

The cloud shelf allowed the retailers to showcase a range of products that would not have possible to reserve for the store otherwise, apart from this geotag technology attached with the product helped the customers to scan by getting more information on the products.

Post-pop-up stage

During the course of prior stages, the stores built up a lot of steam. However, eventually, the retailer needs to nourish the customer’s relationship with the development of more exclusive pop-ups (Reynolds, 2017). At this stage, the store needs to obtain two major objectives, firstly to keep the customers involved and progress in planting seeds for the next cycle for sharing it with the exclusive customers.

At the end of the pop up set up and product lifetime, there might be some left over stocks. These outlet stores are usually set up in a remote location and in inconvenience way (Bell and Bell, 2018). Therefore, destocking pop up store in this stage takes the radical approach and in turn, transforms the store into a last-minute experience for the audience.

Conclusion

From the above study, it is evident there is the dramatic growth of pop up stores in Australia.  Consumers are increasingly visiting these stores. As these stores offer different and unique products for a limited period of time. Almost 61% of the shoppers list down their seasonal products as the major source at their pop up store. However, drawing from the instances of the study, it can be said that in the future the online store will be the more traditional approaches than the pop-up stores that will be growing popularity in collaboration with a traditional and hybrid model of business while building memorable experienced with the customers. On the contrary, in a location where the retail property is under pressure pop-ups might become increasingly well known.

Apart from all these challenging issues, the pop-up store is extremely beneficial as they offer a low-cost platform with a reduced amount of risk for innovative items. Moreover, these stores offer both limited rent and flexible duration to advertise products. Again to the retailers, the methods offer a high-income stream other than vacancy along with a communication opportunity over a long period of the tenancy. Therefore, it is necessary for the pop-up stores do not operate with a standalone substitute. They need to work in collaboration with traditional shopping fronts with the online store to enhance and elevate brand identification and target new customers.

Reference list

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Bell, H. and Bell, R., (2018). Applying enterprise: active learning environments for business Higher National Diploma students. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 42(5), pp.649-661.

Bonetti, F. and Perry, P., (2017). A Review of Consumer-Facing Digital Technologies Across Different Types of Fashion Store Formats. In Advanced Fashion Technology and Operations Management (pp. 137-163). IGI Global.

Cummins, C. (2014). ‘Pop-up’ stores on the increase across Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald. [Online] Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/popup-stores-on-the-increase-across-australia-(2014)0126-31gpx.html [Accessed 11 Aug. (2018)].

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Fredericks, J., Tomitsch, M., Hespanhol, L. and McArthur, I., (2015), December. Digital Pop-Up: investigating bespoke community engagement in public spaces. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction (pp. 634-642). ACM.

Jensen, A., Patmore, G. and Tortia, E., (2015). Conclusion. Co-operatives in Australia and Italy: lessons and prospects. Cooperative Enterprises in Australia and Italy, p.265.

Kwon, H.J. and Brinthaupt, T.M., (2015). The motives, characteristics and experiences of US Black Friday shoppers. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 6(4), pp.292-302.

Overdiek, A., (2017). Fashionable Interventions: The Pop-up Store as Differential Space. Organizational Aesthetics, 6(1), pp.116-134.

Powell, D. (2018). Alibaba’s future of retail involves QR codes, smart mirrors, and gamified discounts – SmartCompany. [Online] SmartCompany. Available at: https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news-analysis/alibabas-future-of-retail-involves-qr-codes-smart-mirrors-and-gamified-discounts/ [Accessed 11 Aug. (2018)].

Reynolds, J., (2017). Retailing and marketing in the digital economy: meeting the new business challenges. Social Science Asia, 3(3), pp.1-12.

Williams, S. (2016). There’s no stopping Australia’s pop-up shop boom. [Online] Commercial Property & Real Estate News. Available at: https://www.commercialrealestate.com.au/news/pop-up-shops-theres-no-stopping-australias-latest-retail-boom/ [Accessed 9 Aug. (2018)].