GANDT Fireside Chat #015 | Google’s Rising Retail Categories, Alibaba’s “Luxury Soho”, Success of Food.de

True to our motto “Working Out Loud”, we at GANDT Ventures exchange our thoughts and ideas on current news topics in the world of online marketing, digital retail, and e-commerce. This helps us uncover opportunities that can be used for companies and our clients as part of our daily business.

But most of all, it is a lot of fun and a great way to share knowledge. Our podcast-style chats are available to anyone who is interested to find out more about what Google, Facebook, Amazon and the likes are up to.

food.de – Crisis as an opportunity

At the beginning of the Corona crisis, many people were almost “forced” to change their buying-behavior and switched to online supermarkets. Due to the explosive increase in inquiries, providers such as Amazon Fresh and Rewe Online had some difficulties. By contrast, the online supermarket Food Direkt was able to cope with the storm.

Behind the online supermarket food.de is Food Direkt GmbH, an independent company founded in 2011 by Karsten Schaal and Christian Fickert in Leipzig, Germany.

Suddenly 25 times as many registrations as usual arrived and food.de realized within 3 days a turnover, which they normally achieve in two weeks, said Schaal.

Because Schaal and Fickert had already developed software that digitally simulated their online supermarket on a ten-fold scale before the company was founded, the Leipzig-based company was able to react immediately and quickly increase its logistics.

The company now employs 3 times as many people as before. After the pandemic, however, the number should decrease again, says Schaal.

What Schaal had not expected, were the shopping baskets, which reached up to 600 Euros. With a family of four, that would be a four-week supply. This also resulted in delivery times of up to two weeks for food.de. The customer volume has already settled down somewhat, but the purchase volume is still permanently higher than before the crisis.

Has a new shopping culture already emerged and have customers become accustomed to ordering food online or will the online boom return to its original level?

Alibaba: The new outlet platform for luxury retail “Luxury Soho

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has launched a new outlet luxury goods platform called “Luxury Soho“.

On the platform, brands can set up their own online shops to sell remaing stock resulted from the store closures imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. The brands have the possibility to bring selected products and collections into an online store and address the individually specific Chinese audience.

They can determine pricing, product selection and strategy themselves.

The platform is designed to help luxury brands to address new customers. This is because Luxury Soho is a platform for luxury offers, older collections, timeless classics and vintage collectibles.

China was the first market to be affected by the Corona Pandemic and so the so-called Chinese shopping tourism was also eliminated in Europe.

One of the consequences of the pandemic is that department stores and luxury shops are sitting on large quantities of unsold goods due to the lockdown. Furthermore, the shops also need a way to find new customers. This also includes the closed down Chinese tourism, so that there is no money coming into the stationary shops as usual.

New insights from Google – Growing retail categories as trending topics

Google has released a new tool that provides insights about current topics and search results.

The Google tool Rising Retail Categories provides data on the most frequently searched product categories. It is therefore ideal for content creation, planning promotions or finding new product ideas.

The Internet search engine plans to gradually update the tool with new data. Google has never shared this kind of insight before.

To date, companies have used resources like Google Trends, social listening tools, surveys and their own data to understand changing consumer interests.

To use Google Trends you need to know what you want to search for. But what if you want to get general information about current topics? This is where the tool Rising Retail Categories comes into play.

Rising Retail Categories is a user-friendly tool that was developed similar to Google Trends. It contains a list of the currently most popular product categories and shows how the consumer interest in this category has changed from month to month.

It is possible to filter the data by different countries and adjust the desired period. Furthermore, a list of trend requests for this category is displayed. A map is used to illustrate where the highest search volume for a specific product category comes from.

The acquired data can be used by marketing for content creation, promotions and as inspiration for new product ideas.

However, Rising Retail Categories is currently only available in the USA, UK and Australia. We are therefore eagerly awaiting the release in Europe.

Agenda | GANDT Fireside Chat Video #015