Clothing in physical stores is sold at a high price of 500 yuan, while the same style on e-commerce platforms only costs several dozen yuan. The reason for the low price of clothing purchased online is not just the reduction of store costs.
The "exclusively for e-commerce" products have brought many impacts. So, what is the reason for the "dual prices" in physical stores and online sales?
Obvious price differences between online and offline clothing
With the continuous development of e-commerce, more and more people are getting used to shopping online. From daily household items to various electrical appliances, it seems that more and more people recognize the characteristic of "good quality and low price" of online products. In the e-commerce field, the clothing industry is particularly prominent. As we all know, at the beginning of the development of e-commerce, the clothing industry was the first to enter the public's field of vision.
From the traditional sales model, merchants of offline clothing stores usually go through multiple steps of getting goods. Individual clothing store owners need to get goods from distributors, and distributors need to place orders with factories. After going through multiple rounds, a piece of clothing that originally cost several dozen yuan may cost consumers several hundred yuan or more, and the actual goods received may only be of several dozen yuan in quality.
For consumers, apart from the advantage of being able to get the goods immediately when buying clothing offline, there seems to be no other advantages. Obviously, the reason for the huge price difference between online and offline clothing is that "the wool comes from the sheep".
For merchants selling clothes offline, in order to obtain greater foot traffic and higher sales, they often open their stores in popular areas with large foot traffic or even in large shopping malls. In shopping malls, the prices of shops on different floors are different. The areas that can reach more consumers naturally have higher monthly rents, and these costs are eventually passed on to the clothes. This makes clothes that originally have a low purchase price several times higher when sold to consumers. Consumers are not only paying for the clothes, but also paying for the various services provided by physical stores.
Frequent chaos in online sales
To some extent, buying clothing online is indeed more cost-effective than offline nowadays. Coupled with the fact that various brand clothing basically have fixed sales stores online and the quality is also guaranteed correspondingly, so people naturally prefer to buy clothing online. In recent years, online clothing sales have gradually improved their safeguard measures. In order to give consumers the cost of trial and error, various platforms have launched freight insurance systems to make up for the lack of fitting links in online sales.
Although from the general environment, most consumers can currently ensure buying their favorite clothing through freight insurance. However, in some details, there are still many hidden dangers in buying clothing online. In previous years, many brand clothing was exposed to the situation of inconsistent products online and offline. Some brands will distinguish between online and offline supplies. Even for the same product, the quality offline will be better than online. This leads to many consumers seemingly buying the same products offline at a more favorable price online, but the actual product quality they get is not as good as that sold offline.
According to some media reports, some consumers who have tried on clothes in physical stores find products with the same item number in online official stores, but what they buy back is far inferior to the quality of the clothes tried on in physical stores. In terms of fabric and workmanship, there is a big difference between the two. The clothes purchased online have many loose threads and the texture is far inferior to the clothes sold offline. Over time, some consumers who were once keen on online shopping will be discouraged by such "substandard products exclusively for e-commerce" and return to physical stores again.
"Dual prices" are not advisable
In this case, the original problem is once again in front of consumers, that is, most offline clothing products are more expensive than online prices. According to the "Double Eleven" sales data counted by some media last year, taking 冲锋衣 as an example, in most brand stores offline, the price of a basic 冲锋衣 is more than 800 yuan, and the configuration is only average. On the contrary, on online sales platforms in the same period, consumers can buy 冲锋衣 with higher configurations for only about 400 yuan. This "dual price" is not only found in the category of 冲锋衣. From spring and summer to autumn and winter, almost every clothing category has this situation. Coupled with various promotional activities of online sales platforms every year, the price that consumers pay online is extremely exaggeratedly cheaper than offline.
However, from the current product quality, the price advantage of cheaper products online does not come from the reduction of storefront costs and transportation links. A few brands adopt low-price sales methods to attract more online consumers, but because product quality requires corresponding costs to be guaranteed, in the end, merchants choose to cut corners on product quality to maintain the "low-price advantage". In any case, this approach is not advisable. Consumers do indeed hope to buy products at a more favorable price, but the prerequisite is that the product quality is of the same standard as that sold offline.
Nowadays, consumers are putting forward higher and higher requirements for commodities. If online merchants want to obtain better sales data, they must make the product quality the best, provide consumers with a better purchasing experience, and achieve a win-win result for both parties. And since offline merchants cannot lower the price to be on par with online due to fixed cost expenses, they can pay more attention to the service quality provided by service personnel. After all, for some consumers who have requirements for the quality of life, the process of trying on and choosing clothes in physical stores is also one of the reasons why they choose to buy clothes offline.
Whether online or offline, product quality and the sales and service attitudes of merchants are extremely important. Only by doing business in good faith can more consumers be won over.