Category: temporary on rent

Mobile Payments accelerating Pop-ups

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1. MOBILE PAYMENTS ACCELERATING THE POP-UP MOVEMENT IN INDIA

When I first heard of pop-up shops, I thought they were specialty booksellers. I had no idea how popular the idea of temporary retail spaces would be in the new age of digital commerce, but right away, I realized how mobile tools could help make them successful. From tables set up at exhibitions to temporary stalls put up by food vendors, these stores need a way to process the payments customers are likely to make.

Mobile Payments

2. MOBILE PAYMENTS OFFER THE SAFEST OPTIONS AVAILABLE

Multiple forms of mobile payments like wallets and UPI exist today, though some will be better suited to your pop-up store. You can set up a table at a flea market and accept payments with PayTM, or you could accept payments via cell phone with UPI/BHEEM.

You could use a service like MTAP to accept credit cards through your smartphone or tablet.

Or, tap into direct carrier billing (AirtelPay)/(Ji0Money) and (Vodafone pay) to allow customers to make purchases and have the cost applied to their cell phone bills.

The options are endless. So, if you want my advice, make sure you check out the options that integrate best with your business and transaction platform.

3. INCREASING TICKET SIZE, PROFITS, AND EASE OF USE

One of the biggest obstacles to establishing a successful temporary rental spot is being able to accept multiple forms of payment. Letting your customers pay with credit and debit cards and with the multiple new “Wallet Options” now will have a significant impact on your profits. For example, in India, 90% -of-sale purchases are made with cash but only in case of small transaction values but there is a definite uptake of other means of payments.

Related Post: Your space is your leverage!

Studies show that a variety of payment options motivate customers to spend more. Today’s customer likes–and trusts–options, so when you offer them the option to pay in whatever way they feel is best for them, and they’ll reward you by spending more and definitely more than the cash they usually carry!
Lastly, you need an affordable way to take payments that you can quickly figure out. Today’s top tools are easy to install and understand, and they have options you can use for analyzing sales to improve your business.

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Brick-and-mortar retailers: it’s time to take online to offline

temporary retail space

The last couple of years have seen a lot of noise about e-commerce. Be it the meteoric rise of marketplaces closing billions of dollars in funding to the sharp fall of hype masking massive losses or be it democratizing access in remote areas to the government taking lead to change the e-commerce landscape by pushing digital transactions.

What really baffles me is despite all the noise, online retail sales are merely 1.5–2.5 percent of the total retail sales today, which is expected to grow to 8–10 percent in the next five to seven years. Even in a developed market like the US, online retail sales are less than 20 percent of overall retail. The deep discounting of these online marketplaces has changed consumer behavior forever. They now equate online to discounts & demands similar price cuts from offline stores. No wonder most offline retailers run a sale or offer discounts for most of the year.

Offline retailers are now stuck. On the one hand, their growth is tapering, their brand with multiple touch points at retail stores throw chequered experiences. On the other hand, when shopping online, consumers expect the same service & experience they receive at a storefront. The complexity between the old legacy systems & the new cutting-age technology is increasing, but consumers want the same price discounts like the online stores. No wonder, several quick-service restaurants have closed around 80 outlets in 18 months.

The main question is ‘What can offline retailers do?’ Should they also create their own e-commerce sites, spend a huge amount of money on marketing to get consumers. Or become one of the thousands of sellers on the marketplace & be at their mercy to garner short-span consumer time. This is playing to their weakness & not strength.

Offline retailers have high overheads & inventory costs, they also have their strength of proximity to consumers, curated options, in-store advisory & entertainment options. They can use this to their advantage.

Related Post: What are Pop-up shops?

This has been explained below:-

1)      Curation: Retailers should realize that online shopping is becoming more of l, an ordeal than ever, with hundreds of SKUs for a certain product all trying to fit on a small screen. Somewhere along the line, the idea of ‘choice’ morphed into options, varieties, & platforms that are overwhelming, to say the least. Consumers today have so many choices that their attention span has greatly reduced & decision-making has become harder than ever before. However, because of limited shelf space, an offline retailer offers curation of some form & shape. Settling up in-store displays based on data about products frequently bought simplifies & speeds up the purchase process in retail stores. For example, placing basmati rice next to masalas, & noodles next to pasta. A similar transformation is starting across categories, especially electronics, mobile phones, fashion, furniture, home decor, & more.

2)     Know your customer (KYC): Buying offline is a fairly anonymous experience unlike online. Retailers should get to know their customers who stay in their proximity better, understand their purchase behavior, & start treating them differently. Unorganised Kirana shops are currently doing it, but it’s time that organized chains, like Café Coffee Day, Big Bazaar, Shoppers Stop, also start doing it. Almost all of the big chains are using loyalty cards/membership plans, it is time to move towards a mobile loyalty solution coupled with IoT beacons for proximity interactions. In order to eat the same Mac Chicken burger with fries & coke, why do I have to stand in the queue every time I have to order it? I am different from my wife & my neighbor, but we all see the same static menu. Why is my interaction so impersonalized & standard every time at the Point of Sale (POS)?

Can IoT beacons not help re-imagine these interactions at the right place, at the right time, all the time? Can app-based loyalty & payments solutions (for example, QR code) bridge the gap between the old & new systems? Use it with beacons to provide in-store coupons & recommendations on its retailer’s app like how Target is doing in the west. Why not utilize the same tools of data & analytics that your online brethren are doing to make the in-store experience much more customized & personal.

3)      Advisory: India has a culture of “Do it for me” versus the US “Do it yourself”. That’s why we have a flourishing consultant/ middle-man economy, for real estate, tax & investment, career & all government services like driver licenses & passport. We love getting advice from humans than machines. Why retailers do not use this insight for better sales & support staff training and treat them as partners to use the in-store interaction to upsell/cross-sell. These consultants are the ones who will convert consumer touch points into unflinching loyalty & trials into repeat purchases.

4)     Engagement & experience: Shopping is NOT Buying! Retailers need to understand that millennials want an experience rather than just buying things. They are constantly fluctuating between brick & click visiting brick-and-motor to validate his/her online research & touch/feel the product he/she cannot do online. If I am preparing for a party & I go into the store to buy ingredients, what may excite me beyond price discount will be to get some educational content on cooking & hosting, & training, community of similar cooking enthusiast, & some tips from celebrities. Try to bundle your product with services around setting up, usage, finance to post-sale service & help. Start to engage with their shoppers through content, community, & experiences; be it cool things like virtual/augmented reality at one end to basic personalized experience at POS.

Related Post: Temporary Retail and Service Spaces

5)     Bridge old & new: Become an omnichannel “experience”. Adopt new-age technology of cloud, SaaS, mobility along with bridging the gap with older monolithic systems. Give a consistent brand experience across all your touch points. Also, it is time to get youngsters who are digital natives in your boardrooms to let them take charge.

The war is not over. It has just begun. Even after 20 years of its launch, Amazon’s revenues are still a fraction of those of Walmart. Indians are still enjoying the novelty of walking into an air-conditioned mall & touching & feeling brands. India’s retail market is expected to cross $1 trillion by 2020. There is enough space for each format to grow & thrive, provided they continuously innovate. It’s time to take online the offline way.

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Renting a retail space as easy as booking a hotel

short term renting

Myrsa matches potential short-term tenants with landlords sitting on vacant/unoccupied real estate spaces.

In an age of seasonal and cyclical in-store sales and poor prospects for long-term tenants, Myrsa could be a blessing for commercial real estate!!

Starting a business can cost you your lifetime of savings if you are a small business —     ₹ 18 to 20 Lakhs on an average based on industry standards and yet not even half of them will survive beyond 2 years.

How many more businesses could succeed if entrepreneurs could test out their concepts by slashing one of the major costs of starting a small business: securing a retail/service space.

Yet connecting space users and providers for short-term leases remains cumbersome. If we are successful, renting a temporary space will be almost as easy as booking a hotel room.

Myrsa is focusing on allowing renters and sellers to find each other and exchange inquiries and proposals. We locate and curate vacant spaces on our platform. Myrsa offers a marketplace for short-term retail or service/workspace that makes renting temporary space feel like booking a hotel on MMT or any travel portal. 

Related Post: It’s a win-win!

If online is about convenience, then offline is about getting your product and service in front of real people and being where your customers are. We see the future of retail and last mile service/web-stores going towards temporary leasing and targeted outreach!

Signing up with Myrsa is easy, in practice it is as convenient as booking a hotel or a flight, with some additional steps to complete the booking by making the payment.

The current trend of established & large retailers using temporary spaces to market feature or test new products is moving toward small business owners as well who want to try out ideas without committing to conventional long-term leases.

short term renting

It’s great news for property owners as well who once coveted big retailers and long-term tenants, but see temporary businesses and exhibitions drawing record crowds, filling up vacancies and even making temporary clients into long-term customers within no time if space works for the tenant.

We believe our model will let landlords generate additional income from their vacant & unused space while opening up the possibility of a retail store to far more brands, entrepreneurs, service providers,  artists, designers and who could not (or would not) sign long-term contracts till now.

Temporary stores could potentially help give offline retailers some of the low-cost agility enjoyed by online sellers such as Flipkart & Amazon. (The online surge has led to predictions of the imminent demise of brick-and-mortar businesses).

Retail in India always had roots in short-term retail and it’s coming a full circle. The urban shopping districts of India and especially the Tier 1 & Tier 2 cities are transforming. We see temporary shops on all our footpaths, don’t we?  They are everywhere!!

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O2O Commerce Is a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

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Until recently, O2O technology was not available but now it’s a multibillion-dollar industry.

Online to offline (“O2O”) commerce is all the rage now. Couple of years back, when Alibaba invested over $3 billion in the technology, the media took note and journalists around the world began discussing the future of the O2O industry in Asia and abroad.

o2o

Businesses would have better accuracy in their online marketing plans and, for the first time ever, would be able to reliably determine ROI from online advertising if enabled with O2O platforms, tools and services. Until recently, this technological ability simply did not exist.

Online advertising has not innovated much in the past decade, causing many business owners who want higher conversion rates, better analytics, and better customer targeting to become increasingly frustrated due to bad conversions and poor ROI.

O2O marketplace platforms are the next step forward in an industry that has not seen innovation for years.

According to Ruben Ghosh, CEO of O2O marketplace Myrsa, whose mission is to bridge the gap between online and offline commerce, thinks the opportunity is a big one. A trillion dollars at-least.

Huge volume of offline spending

According to the reliable sources, over 93 percent of purchases still take place offline, which accounts for over $5 trillion each year. Most people are intimidated and at the same time taken aback by this number. Everybody thinks that, because of our integrated lives with the internet, online spending would be much higher.

Data shows that a massive amount of spending still continues offline and that’s likely to continue for years. The challenge businesses face is bringing that online audience directly into their stores and knowing how to attract them and how much it would cost.

Trillion-dollar opportunity?

We know that the average Indian earns around Rs 1,03,219 annually and the average e-commerce shopper spends Rs 7,956 per year online. Apart from taxes, where does the rest of the Rs 95,262 go?

It goes to the offline economy: grocery stores, real estate, car dealerships, restaurants, etc. Bridging this gap allows businesses to actively compete for that commerce using online advertising ensuring better conversions & ROI.

Related post:  It’s a win-win!

Small-business challenges

In case of Small-business owners and their marketing strategies, data shows that when asked which marketing channels were most effective, “only 3 percent found PayPerClick (PPC)” to be an effective lead generation tool.

This is prevalent because PPC platforms are complicated and are difficult to set up and often do not offer reliable or easy to understand analytics.

Platform Solutions out there offer advertisers guaranteed ROI on ad spending and small-business-friendly platforms will continue to grow in popularity as online marketing becomes a must for local business owners.

Consumer research trends

Over 60 percent of consumers research a product online before going to a store to make a purchase. Bridging the gap between when someone who is viewing a product online and when they enter a store to complete a purchase could create an entirely trackable revenue stream for business owners.

If someone is searching for your product and finds it online, that’s a confirmed lead! You want to capture that. Technology has finally caught up and making that capture possible, which is an enormous win for advertisers.

While trends come and go, the idea behind O2O commerce is here to stay. Despite recent advancements made in technology, companies are yet to perfectly align with consumer shopping trends and the needs of business owners.

This trillion-dollar problem lacks a perfect solution even now, but entrepreneurs are rapidly solving this mystery with a few promising options coming to the fore.

As the loop between online and offline commerce closes, business owners, advertisers, and, most importantly, consumers are well positioned for a great deal.

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Temporary Retail and Service Spaces

Rent My Parking Space

Myrsa matches potential short-term tenants with landlords sitting on vacant/unoccupied real estate spaces.

In an age of seasonal and cyclical in-store sales and poor prospects for long-term tenants, Myrsa could be a blessing for commercial real estate!!

Starting a business can cost you your lifetime of savings if you are a small business — INR 18 to 20 Lacs on an average based on industry standards and yet not even half of them will survive beyond 2 years.

How many more businesses could succeed if entrepreneurs could test out their concepts by slashing one of the major costs of starting a small business: securing a retail/service space.

Yet connecting space users and providers for short-term leases remains cumbersome. If we are successful, renting a temporary store will be almost as easy as booking a hotel room.

Myrsa offers a marketplace for short-term retail or service/workspace that makes renting temporary space feel like booking a hotel on MMT or any travel portal.

Myrsa is focusing on allowing renters and sellers to find each other and exchange inquiries and proposals. We locate and curate vacant spaces on our platform.

If online is about convenience, then offline is about getting your product and service in front of real people and being where your customers are. We see the future of retail and last mile service/web-stores going towards temporary leasing and targeted outreach!

Signing up with Myrsa is super easy, theoretically, it is as convenient as booking a flight or a room, with some additional steps to finalize the booking.

The trend of large retailers using temporary spaces to feature or test new products is moving toward small business owners as well who want to try out ideas without committing to conventional three- to five-year leases.

Related Post: The many talents of the space you own

It’s great news for property owners as well who once coveted big retailers and long-term tenants, but see temporary businesses and exhibitions drawing record crowds, filling up vacancies and even making temporary clients into long-term customers within no time if space works for the tenant.

We believe this model will let landlords generate additional income with unused space while opening up the possibility of a retail store to far more brands, entrepreneurs, service providers,  artists, designers and who could not (or would not) sign long-term contracts in the past.

Potentially, temporary stores could also help give physical retailers some of the low-cost agility enjoyed by online sellers such as Flipkart & Amazon (who have led to predictions of the imminent demise of brick-and-mortar businesses).

Retail in India always had roots in short-term retail; it’s coming a full circle.

The urban shopping hubs of India and especially the metros are transforming. We see temporary shops on all our footpaths, don’t we?  They are everywhere!!

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