Online isn't a multiple-choice question. It's a required one
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
At a meeting today I was chatting with the owner of an offline grocery business, and he said something that surprised me: online doesn't matter, just do offline well.
By the end I went quiet. Some discussions are worth continuing when both sides are still curious. But when the other person is already certain of the answer, carrying on easily turns into a pointless argument. I had no interest in proving I was smarter. It's just that after the meeting I kept wondering: at this stage, how can anyone in retail still be so sure online doesn't matter?
Look at Walmart. Is its offline business strong enough? Purchasing, supply chain, store footprint: all world-class. Yet back in 2016 it spent about US$3.3 billion to buy Jet.com and shore up its e-commerce capability. That doesn't mean every investment works out, but at least they didn't decide that being big offline meant they could ignore what customers wanted online.
Then look at China. In Walmart China's latest quarterly numbers, e-commerce made up 55% of total sales. That figure covers both Walmart and Sam's Club in China, not Sam's alone. Sam's has its own app with express and scheduled delivery, as fast as one hour to your door. Even Costco has online shopping and same-day delivery. The retailers we most love to study have been taking this seriously for a long time.
We don't have to keep talking about the US and China. Here in Malaysia there's Jaya Grocer. By the numbers I've heard, about 17% of its sales already go through Grab. If that ratio holds, for every RM100 of business, RM17 comes from customers who never had to walk into the store. You can debate this channel's margin, delivery costs, and whether it brings in extra business, but it's hard to wave it off as "not important".
When many people think of e-commerce, they still picture Shopee, Lazada and TikTok: open a store, run ads, sell cheap. But online grocery can be simple. The customer orders on the phone, and you deliver from the nearest store. On the weekend he has time, so he brings the family and browses slowly. On a Wednesday, tired after work and out of milk, he tops up on his phone. The same customer has different needs at different times. In retail, do we only want to serve the moment he has time to walk in?
So I've always felt that online isn't a multiple-choice question. It's a required one. You can decide how much to invest, when to start, whether to do it yourself or with a platform, and you might find after doing the maths that a certain delivery model doesn't pay for now. Those are all business judgements. Nobody says going online makes money straight away, and nobody says offline doesn't matter. But at the very least you have to answer: when your customer wants to buy online, how will you catch them?
Of course, since I run e-commerce myself, I know better than most that sales aren't profit. Platform fees, ad spend and fulfilment costs can each eat your margin, and done carelessly you'll lose money. So what's really worth sitting down to discuss is how to make it meaningful, and how to let existing stores, inventory and supply chain serve more shopping occasions. Those questions are practical, and far more worth the time than arguing whether online is useful at all.
The longer I've been in business, the more I remind myself not to look down too quickly on things I'm not familiar with. Doing a bit well online is no reason to look down on offline. And decades of offline experience don't guarantee that the old playbook will always be enough. Past success is precious, but if it costs us our curiosity, it can become a very large blind spot.
In business, it's normal not to know how to do many things, not to understand them, or even to do them badly. I have a pile of things I don't understand every day. But "I don't know how to do this yet" and "this doesn't matter at all" are very different things. The first keeps you asking, learning and trying. The second may stop you from even looking. Sometimes the question to ask yourself isn't "didn't the old way work for me?" but this: if customers have already changed, what makes me think I can stay the same?
It reminds me of a line from Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem: "Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is."