Dollar Stores Struggle to Adapt to the E-Commerce Age

What You Need To Know:

• Dollar stores, which have flourished in recent years, face slowing growth amid growing competition from low cost retailers, including Walmart, Target, Big Lots, and Wish.com.
• Dollar stores will need help building e-commerce infrastructure along with ways to track inventory and target consumers through mobile devices.

How you can capitalize:

• Buy online, pick up in store. This model has allowed brick and mortar retailers to use inventory from physical stores fill online orders, in effect turn existing stores into mini-warehouses for digital commerce. Many dollar stores must still build out their websites and mobile apps to allow consumers to search for product/price information. They also need to create inventory systems that match online orders with available merchandise.
• Digital marketing. Dollar stores attract a good deal of traffic, a captive audience that retailers can reach to boost in-store sales through mobile devices. Research shows that dollar stores consumers often use paper coupons but would overwhelmingly prefer digital coupons if the retailer offered them. Dollar stores need a system that can target specific consumers with coupons via smartphones based on their purchase histories.
• Opportunistic inventory. Dollar stores have been upgrading the quality of their merchandise by purchasing excess inventory from both national brand manufacturers and struggling retailers who need to liquidate their inventories to pay off creditors. Dollar stores could use a system that helps them predict and track these special situations to acquire inventory at fire-sale prices.

The last big holdout to e-commerce is about to fall.