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General Overview on the Online Retail of Luxury Brands

These years the online retail is on the highway of developing. According to the IReseach, the total value of online retail in the year 2011 has reached 800 billion Yuan. Online retail occupies 4.3% of the whole value of retail. With the change of consuming habits of customers, many world famous brands decide to develop a new retail channel-online retail, in order to satisfy the Chinese customers. GUCCI announced their online retail site www.gucci.com. Burberry developed the “retail theater” for customers to buy on the internet. The first Giorgio Armani online store was also open afterwards. The ones which provoke public’s attention are the online retails of Benefit and Coach from the USA.

The online retail of Benefit and Coach

Different from traditional online retail of other brands, Benefit has put many new products online and has not competed on price. Coach has opened flagship online store on Taobao.com, the largest online C to C and B to C platform in China. The prices of products in the online stores are the same with the ones in physical stores. Besides, the online stores give out little presents to attract customers.

Threads for the Online retail of Luxury Brands

Firstly, the online store customers need to be developed. For now, the primary marketing method for the online retail is to offer lower prices to customers. According to the IResearch report , during the year 2010 to 2011, Chinese customers’ buying online is mainly due to price advantage of luxury products, over 70% of these customers buy for themselves and their ages are lower than 35.For the luxury brands who have started online retail, how to attract the target customers to buy online and success in the online market are two main problems.

Secondly, there are already many retailers of luxury brands such as the overseas purchasing agents on the website now. They have a mature and loyal customer group which are not suppose to be the customers of the Luxury brands’ flagship online store.