On April 30th, Suning’s first smart retail experience center opened at the commercial area of Suning.com Plaza in Nanjing. As an iterative upgrade of Suning.com flagship store, the new center aims to provide smart lifestyle experience for consumers, which is also a benchmark for Suning strategic retail development. Since its opening in December 1999, the flagship store of Suning.com has accumulated more than 2 million members over 20 years while it has witnessed the transformation and development of China’s home appliance retail industry.
The comprehensive upgrade of Suning flagship store in Nanjing is the result of the integration of the digital economy and the “first-store economy”, bringing consumers with a digital and modern shopping experience. It is also an important measure to accelerate the promotion of consumption, optimize the consumption structure, and improve the quality of economic development. The new store will break the time and space restrictions, achieve 24-hour sampling of all categories, further accelerate the integration of all scenarios, and open up dual-line products and services. Consumers will benefit from the smart screen “virtual shelf” to purchase products, achieving an O2O mode and creating new shopping experiences through Internet tools such as applets, communities, and live streaming.
Not only satisfied with brick-and-mortar store, the upgraded flagship store has transformed to an omni-channel platform. Offline shopping has become an optional demand while product and scenario experience have turned into the main purpose for consumers to differentiate from traditional shopping stores.
To improve consumers’ experience, Suning added many technological and lifestyle elements. When customers enter the store, they will be easily eye-cached by Suning’s showroom. It is a masterpiece of the comprehensive renovation of original store. The showroom uses a highly technological scenario design covering a total area of 400 square meters and is composed of 3 LEDs to form an L-shaped stage interactive screen and 3 transparent window screens. It mainly undertakes Suning’s core partner launching ceremony and high-end shows and main PR activities. Furthermore, there are also several Internet famous products and brands introduced into the flagship store to cater to young generation to increase their interactions, including Hygge Coffee, Biu Smart Home appliances, Dyson, Joyoung Line friends Products and 5G Experience Lounge.
Benefiting from the online and offline mode, consumers select and purchase products from the virtual shelf, the new flag store achieved GMV of RMB 10 million in only 58 seconds and reached to RMB 100 million in 13 hours. Among which, smartphone, air-conditioner, refrigerator, sun cream and steak ranked top 5 popular categories for consumers.
As for the 30th anniversary of Suning Group, the company now focuses on shifting to improving efficiency and digital development to fulfill the rising shopping demand. In addition, the new store is a beginning for Suning’s smart and lifestyle strategy, leading the industrial digital and scenario transformation to expand its retail business.
