Shopping Wars

A retail war is waging between two super-powers … the battle lines have been drawn. On one side, we have the Live Shopping Experience and on the other, Online Shopping. The Live, In-store Shopping Experience has thousands of years under its belt – battle-tested through centuries of opponents treating billions of shoppers to the magical euphoria of finding and purchasing that perfect item. Then, there’s the “rookie” – Online Shopping – with its futuristic, high-tech promise of making the act of buying anything so easy that eventually, as technology catches up, your purchased item will land at your doorstep delivered by a little spaceship called a drone within ten minutes of merely thinking about that item.

Nestled within this global-scale shopping war are many smaller battles, like: where are consumers buying their beauty products? Live Shopping or Online?

Current Score (per Statista.com)

• Online = 7.8%
• In-store Shopping = 92.2%

The scary question that salon operators ask all the time is, “will online purchases of beauty products eventually dethrone live shopping?”
Here is what we know so far: as long as people shop for reasons other than the simple act of acquiring items, physical retail (what they call brick-and-mortar) stores will stay astonishingly relevant. What we are seeing is that as we all become more attached and plugged into technology 24/7, our desire to connect and engage physically with people and have real human connections grows.
Live Shopping has always been a very engaging human activity. Physiologically, it can be traced as far back in history to the time when humans were simply called “hunters and gatherers.” We’ve always shopped. From marketplaces in Rome in 400 BC through time and many more generations all the way to today’s posh Fifth Avenue department stores. We’ve shopped our hearts out! Ironically, you could say “live shopping” is hardwired in our brains and psyches.

The scary question that salon operators ask all the time is, “will online purchases of beauty products eventually dethrone live shopping?”

We physically shop to explore and discover! At its purest level, Live Shopping always holds that promise of excitement for that beautiful moment when we discover something new or find that hidden treasure – it’s the thrill of the hunt! As we shop online, Google and all the other online super computers collect data from our shopping habits and reduce us down to a 92-point buyer profile that determines what we want before we even know we want it. Effectively, this all but eliminates any chance to explore and discover on a human level. This is happening now – one online purchase at a time.
Live Shopping feels good and it feels right – it’s like a drug. Actually, from the 100s of studies conducted with live shoppers, we know it makes our brains release dopamine which is, in fact, a drug that our body creates. They call it the “feel good hormone” and our bodies produce it when we shop. The better the shopping (a reward-motivated behavior), the more dopamine we produce. The only thing produced by Online Shopping is a computer-generated profile that records and knows your every keystroke, as well as all our financial info, then uses that info to suggest what it thinks we should buy. Very boring and non-human!
So, the answer to the scary salon operator question: Emphatically NO – not on our watch! As long as we continue to create very human and engaging shopping experiences in our facilities, Live Shopping will always have the edge.