The Digital Age Has Come To The |Zara Store: Automatic Click Picking, Self Checkout, RFID Interactive Fitting Mirror.

Zara will upgrade the retail concept based on the Westfield Stratford City flagship store in East London.

May 21, 2018: fast

Brand Zara's flagship store reopened in London last week revealed the latest retail concept to consumers in the digital age that will sweep over nearly 100 markets around the world.

Over the past 4 months, the East London Westfield Stratford City flagship store, which has an area of 4500 square meters, has appeared again with iPad, smart fitting mirror, self checkout, online shopping order, self help picking and other pioneer technologies. It has revealed the determination of the world's largest apparel retailer, Inditex SA (ITX.MC), Yin Di Textile Group, to fundamentally improve customer shopping experience.

In addition to the conventional areas for women's wear, men's wear and children's clothing, the store also has a click and pick area. Customers can only pick up the bar code with the order of online purchase order, and the whole process is fully operated by the mechanical arm which can handle 2400 packages at the same time.

Online shopping order before two o'clock in the afternoon can pick up the goods on the same day, otherwise you will need to pick up the goods the next day.

According to the March edition of the Wall Street journal, Zara's global online business accounts for up to 1/3 of the order of click and take orders, though this is unbelievable for the highly efficient and developed logistics network in China, but such a high proportion does lead to many local stores, which affect the shopping experience.

Diversified checkout methods are also the characteristics of Zara's new retail concept.

On the basis of traditional manual cash collection, two layers of shops have self-service checkout equipment which accepts mobile payment and credit card. The salesperson will also hand over iPad to pay for customers, or offer shopping advice, online ordering shortages and broken codes.

The interactive floor fitting mirror with RFID (video recognition) system can detect the customer's handheld.

Let customers see the actual try effect and provide shopping recommendation.

Before this shop, Zara began to introduce AR augmented reality experience to 120 flagship stores worldwide.

Zara spokesman Echevarria Hernandez revealed that the RFID system also helped them reduce inventory monitoring frequency to two hours from the previous three days.

Zara East London Westfield Stratford City flagship store

For from

Shop owners to open a garment factory, and then to see the mass democracy and fashion, set foot in the retail business and eventually set up about 7500 stores, the founder of Inditex SA Indo Textile Group, Amancio Ortega Oman Theo Ortega, has always been the top priority of its business and investment strategy.

The group's current chairman and chief executive, Pablo Isla, pointed out in the press release that the reopening of Zara's Stratford flagship store is an important moment for Inditex.

"In recent years, we have focused on investing in cutting-edge technology and store optimization with the aim of creating a comprehensive integration of entity and online global sales platform," Pablo Isla said. Now the group is ready to meet the development opportunities that seamlessly connect to online and offline business models.

Last year, in the same store sales growth slowed by half (to 5%), digital sales of Inditex SA India India Textile Group still maintained a 41% high growth rate. Sales accounted for 10% of the group's net sales of 25 billion 336 million euros, that is, about 2 billion 500 million euros, accounting for 12% of the 47 electronic market sales figures.

Zara's more mature and extensive digital layout, as well as its beautiful, smooth and convenient online shopping experience, has made Inditex SA Indo textile group far outperform H&M Hennes parent Mauritz Hennes (Mauritz) AB (HMb.ST) and Marks & Spencer Group Group (L), Ma Shabai, etc.

H&M, second only to Zara, is also slow to grow because of slow deployment, poor experience, excessive expansion and product problems. Since 2015, the same store sales have not been able to grow. In the past year, the share price of Hennes & Mauritz AB (HMb.ST) has fallen by more than 1/3, and the Group Chairman Stefan Persson, who has spent 6 billion 400 million Swedish Swedish kronor (US $735 million) for many times this year, has caused speculation about privatization.

At present, the Stefan Persson family holds Hennes & Mauritz AB 49.9% shares and 75% of the voting rights.

Zara East London Westfield Stratford City flagship store

The new high-tech and efficient retail mode, especially the click to pick automation, is expected to help Inditex SA Indo textile group raise its gross profit margin in recent years.

Gross profit margin fell further by 70 basis points to 56.3% in the 2017 fiscal year, while the gross profit margin in 2013 was close to 60%.

Analyst Chris Chaviaras, estimated that the stores that have been upgraded by the group will see significant improvements in sales and profits in the latest two years.

Some analysts have reservations about the decision of Zara stores to use robots.

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Lee Peterson, executive vice president of WD Partners, a customer experience consulting firm, pointed out that last year, the world's largest online retailer, Amazon.com Inc. NASDAQ:AMZN (NASDAQ:AMZN), uses more than 75 thousand robots, but they operate in more than 50 thousand square meters of distribution centers.

"Store retailers (with robots) I can understand, but small stores also use it," Lee Peterson said.

Paula Rosenblum, managing partner of RSR Research, a retail technology research firm, also said it is hard to believe that Zara's click and pick-up business is worth investing heavily in promoting automation. But he also said that if this is the case, the investment will make greater success for the group.