Bright future online and offline

“The garden centre market has a bright future ahead” - an optimistic analysis of the British garden centre market has been made by the consulting firm mdj2. Nevertheless the study “Grow your own success” by no means conceals the difficulties that the market players are confronted with.
More than once, the author of the study, Andy Newman stresses the speed with which both consumer behaviour and retail concepts are changing and that the sector must respond. Of course what is primarily, but not just meant here is the subject of online and multichannel retailing.
In order to recognise a possible future scenario, one just has to glance over at the neighbouring retail sector: They have made online shopping a part of their customers’ daily lives. The customers obviously expect that they can shop online. They also expect to be able to shop online in the same way as they do in the their local store. In other words, they expect multichannel shopping.
What at first sounds like a horror scenario for stores, characterised by the over-the-counter shopping concept, is turned into an optimistic forecast by the author of the mdj2 study: “As a result we firmly believe that the physical garden centre will continue to play a vital role in the future, but also that because omni-channel is here to stay, the sector needs to embrace rather than resist it, or run the risk of giving away additional sales and profit to generalist retailers”, the study states.
As Andy Newman says, the sector has to catch up. The emergence of the “Click & Collect” concept is playing more and more of an important role. As an example from fashion retailing, M&S now makes 55 per cent of its online sales using this model while at John Lewis the figure is 40 per cent. Here customers seem to appreciate the security of knowing the product is in stock and reserved for them, thus saving any wasted trips. As a result, the time from ordering to collecting is being dramatically reduced. In most cases the goods are available for collection within a few hours. Argos even promises immediate collection while Screwfix promises collection within five minutes.
However, online shopping is only one of the factors that are changing. Retailers from other business sectors are muscling in on the garden centre market. For example, the grocery chain Waitrose rolled out 41 garden centre stores last year and this year the figure is expected to rise to 150 stores, not forgetting their partner Crocus Nursery who operate…