The Covid-19 pandemic has been an incredibly trying time for all of us- changing our lives drastically. One major facet of these changes is how we now purchase our goods- shifting from more traditional brick and mortar retailing to now online shopping.
This is where Online Merge Offline (OMO) comes into play: the OMO model shifts traditionally offline businesses into an online business- essentially providing more opportunities for both the merchant, a newer consumption method for the user, as well as the platform that these merchants are hosted on. This fundamental concept first arose around 2017 within China and has been picking up ever since.
Background
Around the 2nd quarter of 2017 in China, many leading e-commerce platforms began investing in brick and mortar offline merchants. What they did was to invest in traditional offline merchant stores in order to gain more customers with new and added services- a hybridization of the internet, e-commerce, and our non-digital world. Both in the United States and China, leading e-commerce brands such as Amazon and Alibaba (respectively) have invested and channeled substantial sums of money towards traditional offline merchants. This was done in order to gain a larger user base and to incorporate new services that extended beyond their traditional online boundaries.
What is Offline Merge Online
As OMO is a marketing strategy that specifically targets retailers, OMO also provides an added benefit to users by providing an integrated service that merges offline with the online- essentially streamlining customer service, and integrating various components in order to have a more effective business model as a whole. OMO as a whole, revolves around cost-effectiveness and technology-driven sales.
A major reason for the increased attention towards OMO is that companies who were traditionally online, are able to venture towards offline- allowing for merchants to potentially gain more customers. These companies employ the OMO strategy in order to improve and increase their efficiency (in terms of business), and enhance the customer experience- all done in order to gain a larger customer base, essentially increasing overall revenue. Aside from this, businesses also benefit from an increase in data, gathering information from both their online and offline sources.
How Cun Cun Utilizes OMO
At Cun Cun, we incorporate OMO capabilities into our SuperApp, allowing traditional offline Merchants to have a digital presence- tapping into Cun Cun’s own existing Citizen user base. Aside from that, Merchants also have the ability to retain their own original, brick and mortar storefronts and conduct business as usual, along with receiving the added benefit of gaining new customers digitally. These new virtual customers will then be compiled into a database, which Merchants will be able to retain free of charge!
By assisting Merchants with OMO capabilities, Merchants will essentially contribute to Cun Cun and our very own Digital Economy Community System. By coming on board with Cun Cun, Merchants are able to sign up with us on our SuperApp with no up-front costs, and will benefit from a greater audience reach from Cun Cun’s SuperApp Community!
Come on in and join the Cun Cun family as a Merchant today!
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References:
- Nancy Rademaker, “Merging Online and Offline in the Post-Corona Era”
- Mitsui & Co., “Retailing in an Era Without Offline/Online Boundaries”
- CB Insights, “Amazon And Alibaba Have Already Conquered Online Retail. Now They’re Coming For Offline.”
Click Here to learn more about Cun Cun Merchant’s Benefits
