Channels and tools
New Retail is the business model announced in October 2016 by Jack Ma, founder of the Chinese group Alibaba, which merges online and offline buying, logistics and data into a single value chain centred on the consumer.
It was born in China, where the phone was already the main tool for paying and buying: the physical shop, fully digitised, becomes a place of experience and a logistics node serving both walk-in customers and online orders, and apps are used in-store to pay, get information and order what is missing. The difference with smart retail is one of scale: New Retail rethinks the whole business model, from production to delivery, while smart retail brings intelligent technology into the shop. In Europe the idea of the shop as a place of experience has older roots, in the Parisian department stores of the nineteenth century, but the integrated Chinese model has no equivalent of the same scale yet.
An example
Alibaba's Hema supermarkets, which are at once a shop, a restaurant and a sorting centre for thirty-minute home deliveries in the neighbourhood.
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