Online promotions like Cyber Monday lure shoppers away from the high street, but physical shops can fight back by raising their visual appeal.

A sign in BHS on Oxford Street this morning shouted “Black Friday, must end Monday”. Quite apart from the fact that this equates to a retailer extending a 24-hour period by at least 48 hours, it’s no longer Black Friday and is in fact Cyber Monday.

BHS Cyber Monday

BHS Cyber Monday

Following on from Black Friday, Cyber Monday is an online-only promotional bonanza

This is the day when we’re all supposed to sit glued to our screens snaffling up the bargains that appear on the home pages of the retailers we know and love.

It is also, according to some sources, the culmination of a discounting period that will see us buying more online than we have previously.

Words such as convergence, multichannel and mobile will be used thick and fast by those in the know, and once more it would appear that sales via physical shops are under threat.

In-store experience

But hold on a second. Walking along Oxford Street, most retailers seem intent on dragging us through their doors with their equivalent of home pages – the shop window.

“Visual merchandisers have done their best to make us forget the fact that things may be available online. Instead, what we really want is to wander around bricks-and-mortar shops”

John Ryan

As ever at this time of year, the ho ho ho button has been firmly depressed and visual merchandisers have done their best to make us forget the fact that things may be available online. Instead, what we really want is to wander around bricks-and-mortar shops and make an appropriate selection.

And if margins have been affected by Black Friday, hey, don’t worry – never mind the margin, here’s the volume.

Raising the stakes

An interesting figure, and one that is pretty hard to come by, is whether the response to Cyber Monday has been that retailers with physical outlets are actually spending more on their visual merchandising in order to keep things ticking over.

They may well be and if this means higher operating costs, it also probably means more for shoppers to get excited about and continued reasons for them to keep buying in-store.

Three cheers at least, then, for BHS and its ilk. They may be using a somewhat tiresome promotion to fill their windows currently, but along with all other high street merchants they do give us stuff to look at.

And when taken en masse, the high street remains a good place to be – if only because of the efforts that have been made to make it more enticing.

Cyber Monday is undoubtedly important, but so are shops with shop windows. There’s room for both and a better deal for the shopper from a visual perspective. The consumer wins and wins.