20 years of online retailing – a cause for celebration?

While most independent retailers have a website, some of which no doubt bring in extra business – especially when decked in the attractive livery of the shop itself – a surprising few sell their wares through their site. In the fine food world it seems that a happy medium is the most popular. Some retailers sell a select number of ambient products online, while the tried and tested cheese/meat/fish counter is left to traditional customer service.

We speak to a deli, food hall and an established London retailer to find out how the growth of online sales has affected them, and how – if at all – they’ve chosen to embrace it.

Mark Kacary, Norfolk Deli
As we all know the world of retail has changed over the last 20 years, and one of the most significant changes is that it enables me as the retailer to effectively sell to anybody in the world. The result being that I do not need premises everywhere to sell to whoever, wherever. The same applies to my customers in that the world and not just the high street is their shopping mall, so it is critical that The Norfolk Deli is as accessible to our customers on-line as it is on the high street. If we were not on-line then we cannot complain about those who are.

John Shepherd, Partridges
Our website doesn’t provide a great volume of trade, but it’s opened up new customer opportunities for us. We get quite a few international enquiries, and thanks to selling online we’re able to send small quantities of products to individual customers around the world rather than having to deal with bulk deliveries. Lots of our customers live in the UK, visit the store as part of their tourist trail, then want to keep purchasing from us when they return home. Sometimes we can’t fulfil orders, because the postage costs are disproportionate to the price of the item. Some products are quite cheap but heavy, and that added cost can put customers off. Unless it’s a totally unique product which can’t be bought from anywhere else, it doesn’t make economic sense to shop online with us on a regular basis.

Tom Hunt, Ludlow Food Centre
We saw online as an opportunity to increase our sales, increase footfall and increase awareness of the fact we made over half the food we sold. We started retailing online in 2010 so we were fairly late starting. You could say that we followed the trend but I would prefer to say that we wanted to test the water. We had not looked at it before and it seemed like an untapped source of potential new sales. At the time we were optimistic. We never expected to become a national online grocer but we did want to develop new ways to sell our products. Ultimately we lost time and margin.