Web-to-store, drive-to-store: how to generate in-store traffic and build customer loyalty

The context

In Western Europe, e-commerce consolidated in 2023, thereby weakening physical retail networks. According to our annual barometer, e-commerce accounted for 26.7% of retail sales in the U.K. last year, 22% in the Netherlands, 13.2% in Germany and 10% in France. In the most mature categories, the measure of e-commerce is stabilising at 40% in some countries. This is the case for fashion and electronics in Germany and the Netherlands.

At the same time, retailers are facing a fall in demand, linked to a purchasing power crisis linked to inflation, affecting both Europe and the U.S.A. This poses a crucial challenge: how to make physical stores profitable? How can we attract a maximum number of visitors, and convert this flow into sales? Drive-to-store and web-to-store is emerging as a key strategy, linking consumer digital journeys with a physical purchase in store.

In France, footfall in French hypermarkets fell by 1.4% in 2023, according to the Shopping Centres Federation (FACT, formerly CNCC), while e-commerce gained 0.3 points of market share, accounting for 11.6% of total grocery sales. With margins historically low for brick & mortar food retailers, at between 2% and 3% of net profit, these declines in traffic are putting continuous pressure.

Across Europe, the situation of physical specialty retailers is also mixed. Following an array of bankruptcies in the past years (like Camaieu, Scotch & Soda in the Netherlands), specialised retailers keep registering traffic falls since 2020, according to the Procos-Stackr index. In France, traffic dropped by 15.2% in 2020, by 2.6% in 2021, rose by 0.3% in 2022 and fell by 2.3% in 2023. Taking 2019 as base 100, this represents a 19% fall over five years. Emmanuel Le Roch, Managing Director of the Procos federation (gathering specialised retailers) explains this trend by the evolution of the customer journey, which is increasingly digitalised. “Today, consumers do a large part of their research online before going into a store”, he observes. According to Procos, over the period January-September 2024, the fall in footfall continued (down by 2% year-on-year). However, this was offset by an increase of 1.8% in the average basket.

Regarding shopping centres, the traffic picture is mixed. Overall, French malls recorded a 1.9% increase in traffic in 2023, with 2.54 million visits (after a rise of 18.4% in 2022).