Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AD-TO-STORE (Public Marketplace Platform for Digital Marketing applied for driving in-store Sales.)
Reporting period: 2019-12-01 to 2020-03-31
Physical commerce is ceding more and more ground to e-commerce, due to the increasing amount of time people spend online. The advent of digital mobile technologies has given rise to new shopping habits, such as showrooming, which consists in checking online the price of a product while the customer is at a physical store to buy it and deciding to make the purchase online instead. Small local merchants are hit hardest by these trends. Currently, they also have to contend with the crisis derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effect of quarantine restrictions on citizens’ mobility and the opening of businesses, which have also forced potential customers to turn to e-commerce.
The AD-TO-STORE project aims at commercializing a solution that delivers 1-to-1 advertisements with redeemable customer benefits through targeted communications and accurately tracks the sales that are made at brick-and-mortar stores as a consequence of those advertisements. This will allow advertisers (e.g. local retailers) to optimize their marketing budget by receiving an accurate measure of the performance of the ads they place and to entice customers to make purchases at their physical stores.
The AD-TO-STORE project aims at commercializing a solution that delivers 1-to-1 advertisements with redeemable customer benefits through targeted communications and accurately tracks the sales that are made at brick-and-mortar stores as a consequence of those advertisements. This will allow advertisers (e.g. local retailers) to optimize their marketing budget by receiving an accurate measure of the performance of the ads they place and to entice customers to make purchases at their physical stores.
During Phase 1, a feasibility study of the technical, commercial and financial aspects of the project has been made.
The technical feasibility study has resulted in a definition of the technical objectives of the project, the development of a detailed Work Plan to achieve them, an analysis of the operational costs of the future business, and an assessment of the technical risks of the project.
The commercial feasibility study has resulted in findings that support AD-TO-STORE’s entry into the market, such as the size of the digital-to-store market in target European countries (France, Belgium, Spain), the current trends in digital retail marketing and the characteristics of the competition.
Finally, the financial feasibility study has resulted in projections of accumulated profits of 120M€ at the end of the first five years of commercialization.
The technical feasibility study has resulted in a definition of the technical objectives of the project, the development of a detailed Work Plan to achieve them, an analysis of the operational costs of the future business, and an assessment of the technical risks of the project.
The commercial feasibility study has resulted in findings that support AD-TO-STORE’s entry into the market, such as the size of the digital-to-store market in target European countries (France, Belgium, Spain), the current trends in digital retail marketing and the characteristics of the competition.
Finally, the financial feasibility study has resulted in projections of accumulated profits of 120M€ at the end of the first five years of commercialization.
The successful execution of the AD-TO-STORE project would allow Browse&Go to expand outside of France into several European countries (Belgium, Spain, Germany, UK, Italy) and grow in 87 employees at the end of the first five years of commercialization, while helping more than 51,800 merchants to substantially increase sales at their physical stores (up to 5% increase in revenues).