从实体零售到电商：一些我学到的事

From 2014 to 2017 I ran 13 physical retail stores. I stood in the shops almost every day to feel what customers and staff needed, read many books, took many courses, and fell for using e-commerce thinking and data to analyse how customers moved through a store: which counter they see first, what to put there, how to liven up quiet corners. Every square foot was money. Yet however much I rearranged, I closed the last store in December 2017. In 2018 and 2019, e-commerce took off in Malaysia. With no money, my wife and I bought stock at wholesale markets and took orders through social media. A team of three, me, my wife and an auntie, did 100k in sales in a month. A physical store needed 500k upfront, about 30k a month to run, and made at most 70 to 80k a month. That's when I saw that no shelf moves or promotions could fundamentally fix a store's sales, because they didn't solve the customer's pain. E-commerce took off because many areas couldn't buy clothes; our biggest customers were on the east coast. Today e-commerce is everyday life and our biggest market is the Klang Valley. Recently I hit a ceiling again and caught myself staring at CTR, conversion and funnels. Data is a rear-view mirror; the customer's need holds the steering wheel. Traffic is only the pipe; the water source is the customer's reason to open her wallet. Get people's hearts right and the numbers follow.