Low Fashion Giant Zara Set Foot In E-Commerce &Nbsp; Set Up Mall In 6 Countries.

Zara finally set foot in it.

The Spanish low fashion giant opened online in six European countries in September 2nd.

It is reported that the first landing countries include Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom, and Zara in these countries.

Before the "Hawking" on the Internet, Zara has embarked on a lot of preparatory work.

Compared with other fashion retailers, Zara has more Facebook followers. It has attracted 4 million 400 thousand fans at the time of the launch of the Facebook web page, and the iPhone application specifically introducing brand fashion has been downloaded for two million times.

On this basis, its official website recorded 33 million 500 thousand visits last year.

A survey conducted by Nelson, a market research firm, in 55 countries recently showed that clothing ranked second among Internet users' favorite purchases, after books.

In the UK, nearly 10% of clothing sales are conducted through the Internet.

According to this reasoning, Zara active in the Internet should be the pioneer of developing e-commerce.

In fact, before Zara, the major fashion giants began to scramble for Internet business.

GAP group, the world's second largest clothing giant, expanded its online shopping business from the United States to 55 other countries in August 12th, and promised to increase the number of online stores to 65 countries by the end of this year.

In addition, Sweden's H&M group, the world's third largest group, opened online sales in seven countries such as Germany as early as 1998, and plans to enter another leading market in the near future, Britain.

From this perspective, Zara seems to be "behind the scenes".

According to industry estimates, last year Spain's online clothing sales accounted for only 2.5% of e-commerce turnover in the whole year, accounting for only 5.6% in France.

Although Spain's other low fashion brand Mango launched online shopping as early as 2000, sales of online channels accounted for only 1% of its total revenue.

The development of e-commerce in the headquarters country has decided that e-commerce is only a supplementary channel for Zara at this stage.

Besides, Zara also needs to consider the issue of brand coverage for online shopping.

After testing the water in Europe, the company hopes to expand its online store to 77 countries in the world.

But in fact, Zara is famous in Europe. It is still in the initial stage of establishing brand image in more emerging markets, and is still in the initial stage of channel development.

If sales are pferred to the Internet, will it affect the development and management of offline channels?

Take China as an example, Zara entered the Chinese market not long ago, and the consumer groups in China are still small.

At this time, companies want consumers to "enjoy the store's shopping experience and build brand image".

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why Zara currently only opens several European e-commerce platforms.

In fact, even in the European market, Zara's new channels are still facing great challenges.

The expectation of Zara is that online channels and physical stores can update products synchronously, because the pattern of Monday's replacement is very suitable for online shopping consumers.

But the real difficulty is that most e-commerce websites are still undertaking the function of cleaning up inventory or unloading goods.

In other words, e-commerce is still characterized by low prices or discounts.

Lin Wenqin, founder of MMbuy shopping network, once pointed out that "the traditional well-known brands are moved to the Internet to sell online, and the traditional brands are synchronized with the prices of entities in the Internet, resulting in the extremely poor sales volume. Finally, the website often becomes a price list.

For Zara, the company also needs to think about the specific strategy of combining virtual and actual.

For example, how can online and offline channels interact fully? How can online channels be avoided?

"It should be said that consumers will not go shopping in the physical stores because they have online channels. They may be on the Internet looking for a certain style. After going to the store to try it on, they will place the order online."

Ye Qizheng, founder of the tidal network.

It is noteworthy that Zara allows consumers to place orders on the Internet and pick up goods at nearby stores.

To a certain extent, it also promotes the pformation of consumption between online and offline businesses.

In addition to channel conflicts, another major challenge for Zara to do online shopping lies in logistics distribution.

You know, the most important step for B2C companies involved in "fast fashion" is to straighten out the channels and distribution.

Originally, Zara may replenish stores once a week, and after opening the online shopping platform, the company will probably change to "replenishment every day", which will undoubtedly greatly increase the logistics load of the company.

Just imagine, if the logistics efficiency of online shopping can not keep up with the speed of changing Zara a week, how ridiculous it is?