Tmall to partner with Intersport to create sportswear megastore

Alibaba Group's Tmall, China's largest consumer platform for brands and retailers, announced Tuesday it will team up with Intersport Co Ltd, one of the world's biggest sporting goods retailers, to transform the former's flagship store in China into the first New Retail Megastore for sportswear.

The 1,300-square-meter, two-story megastore sits in Qianmen, the historical tourist area of Beijing. Using a number of features powered by Tmall Fashion, it is creating a fun and interactive shopping experience.

Leveraging Tmall's full-fledged New Retail infrastructure that covers customer insights, supply chain management, retail technologies, smart logistics and electronic payments, the megastore infuses a range of technologies and systems to offer customers a seamless online to offline shopping experience.

For instance, the main window display at the store entrance can identify the gender and approximate age of a passerby and intuitively recommend appropriate products, while a smart shoe mirror inside the store can detect which shoes a customer is trying on, and recommend related accessories.

"We are excited to see an extensive range of Tmall's New Retail technologies and features under one roof in Intersport's store," said Jessica Liu, president of Tmall Fashion and Luxury.

"What's even more encouraging is to see our merchants embracing the New Retail concept and exploring its potential. When customers try out these features firsthand, we are confident that they will see the convergence of online and offline shopping as the future of retail," she said.

"Intersport is delighted to open our first New Retail store in partnership with Alibaba's Tmall. Those up-to-date technologies offered by Tmall will give our customers an entirely new shopping experience and help us link our offline and online activities," said Victor Duran, CEO of Intersport.

"We understand the importance of evolving with time, while continuing to offer the best customer experience – something that has always been at the heart of our business," he added.

Zhao Yue, an e-commerce analyst from Beijing-based market research firm Analysys, said that "the 'new retail' mode combining online and offline channels is destined to be the future trend."

"The past few years have witnessed the slowdown of the growth rates of the sales revenues of e-commerce platforms, such as Alibaba and JD.com. The traffic bonus has peaked. The situation also occurred to those brick-and-mortar stores," Zhao said.

According to the report released by the China General Chamber of Commerce and China National Commercial Information Center, retail sales of the country's major large-scale retail enterprises dropped by roughly 0.5 percent year-on-year, but the number again went up in 2017. "The figure demonstrated that the integration of online and offline operation benefits both," she noted.

"Physical stores offer consumers pleasant shopping scenarios, while internet-based e-commerce platforms are good at grasping user data, which is beneficial for the retailers to adjust to their logistics and supply chains. The integration of online and offline stores can raise consumer experiences to the maximum level."

"Last, year, Alibaba Group's Hema Fresh served as a prototype of its New Retail concept. Now, the concept includes clothes, with a trend to encompass the whole category," Zhao said.