As the Christmas shopping period is always the busiest time of the year for both online and offline retailers, eBay announced a change of strategy this year. According to Telegraph, eBay will move to the streets of London in a temporary store that will accommodate a five-day shopping experiment.
The shop will be found on Dean Street, close to shopping go-to place Oxford Street, between December 1st and December 5th. Customers will have the opportunity to see more than 200 of the most popular items available on eBay, but the tricky part is they cannot leave the place with a purchase. All they will have to do will be to use their smartphones to scan the QR codes and the built in app will then redirect the customer to the payment section of eBay website.
The store will also have eight tablets available for the customers looking for gift ideas among entire range of eBay products.This strateg y is not entirely new. eBay launched similar projects in the US, where in temporary stores customers also inspected items and after they made their choice, the eBay RedLaser mobile app allowed them to find the closest retailer that has a particular item on the shelves and customers could also compare prices. At its turn, Amazon also launched a “click and collect” service in the UK similar to Apple’s in-store collection service.
While e-commerce giants come on the streets, merchants are also gearing up with 21st century technology. As a recent report shows, in London the retailers from Oxford Street are looking to get more from the nowadays gadgetry and 23% of them already installed in-store ‘order online’ touchscreen terminals.