I’ve always been frustrated with the broad characterisation of ecommerce and physical retail.

At a high level, there’s always this sense of ecommerce being the plucky disruptor and physical stores being this ageing old giant.

Ecommerce is quick and agile. Physical is slow and lumbering.

Ecommerce is innovative and efficient. Physical is stagnant and disorganised.

And perhaps most fundamentally, ecommerce is always viewed in an opportunistic light – where stores always feel like an expense.

But this mindset rarely allows for the reality that ecommerce creates problems too.

Online shopping invented the returns problem – a problem that was worth $890 billion globally in 2024.

It’s also invented a profitability problem for many. Have a quick Google and see how much evidence you can find of supermarkets making a profit from online deliveries.

It has also created a loyalty problem. Because guess what happens when your only experience of a brand is through a website, and when something goes wrong there isn’t anyone to talk to.

But I have good news. There is a way of solving problems like these and many more that online retailing has created. And it’s a strategy that uses something many retailers totally forgot they already had, all around the world: physical stores!

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