Innovation in Retail One recent innovation in retail is e-commerce, which has totally altered the way that customers can shop and consume. For brick and mortar retailers, a crossroads of sorts has arrived. Should they turn to the technological advancement of e-commerce in order to appeal to consumers? Or has this innovation benefited from tax breaks that are now coming to an end, and which will therefore make this innovation far less appealing to retailers and consumers than it has in the past? Certain factors are at play, including cost and convenience, when it comes to determining whether this innovation is one to which companies should commit themselves. Although the Digital Era is here, e-commerce may have limited appeal now that the Supreme Court has reversed a decades old ruling that freed Internet-based retailers from the constrictions of state sales tax (Fiegerman & DePillis, 2018).

Problem

E-commerce giant Amazon has decimated the brick and mortar retail space in recent years (Grosman, 2018) leaving retailers to find new ways to stay competitive. For some brick and mortar retailers, competing with Amazon has been difficult: many companies have gone bankrupt—like Toys ‘R’ Us—and many more are on the verge of sinking into oblivion, even long-standing companies like Sears (Tuttle, 2017). Others, like Wal-Mart, have attempted to incorporate the e-commerce...

While companies like Wal-Mart have millions to spend on creating a new e-commerce infrastructure, smaller companies may like the resources needed for such an investment.
At the same time, there is a need to do something. If brick and mortar retailers continue to sit on their heels allowing Amazon to gobble up all the sales, they could quickly go out of business. The trouble is that even if they do enter into the e-commerce space, they still have to differentiate themselves from the behemoth that is Amazon—which is essentially like the Wal-Mart of online shopping times 1000. For people who only care about ease of access, Amazon is a simple, one-click approach to shopping that saves a lot of time and hassle. How can a traditional retailer compete? Should a brick and mortar retailer even try to go the way of e-commerce?

Solution

The costs of entering into e-commerce can quickly pile up. There are storage costs, shipping costs, distribution costs, marketing costs, and so on—all of which adds up. While it may be tempting to think that if one cannot beat them, one should join them and thus enter into e-commerce and close the brick and mortar stores. But this is not actually the only solution—nor is it even the correct…