How Magdeburg retailers in the city center are countering the lockdown in the corona crisis.
Magdeburg l The Magdeburg dealers are currently standing between lockdown and the attempt to sell goods anyway. Some of them have become quite creative, but it is hardly possible to outweigh the corona failures. Problems also arise from the experiments on the Internet. The Volksstimme spoke to four dealers in the city center and asked.
WhatsApp as a platform for sales
For fashion retailer Mandy Rose, the lockdown has made the cell phone an important work tool. She has been presenting new goods via WhatsApp status for several years – even more since her shop door closed with the lockdown. She puts together outfits and takes pictures with them. She then shares the pictures via WhatsApp – usually once a week, after all, she doesn’t want to overload the customers. Customers can look at them and ask whether a sweater, skirt or coat is available in the right size. If a customer wants to buy an item of clothing, he can pick it up at the store or Mandy Rose will bring it over himself.
She was able to achieve 30 to 40 percent of the turnover that she normally creates in this way. “I have the advantage that I know almost all of my customers personally,” she says. They know their taste and know what suits them. She is pleased that customers are sticking with her even in these times. She doesn’t want to spread a bad mood. And even if the situation is tense, the trader will not let her positive attitude be spoiled. She is in the store almost every day. In order to make ends meet in private, she applied for support from the job center. In addition, the landlord of the retail space met her. She also wants to have it checked to what extent she can benefit from the aid packages for retailers. “If it doesn’t work anymore, I’ll do something else,” she says. There are clearly worse things than a corona lockdown.
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Sabine Große sends up to 300 parcels a day – just as many are returned. She is annoyed about packaging waste. Photo: Christina …
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Franz-Josef Lohmeier hopes for an end to the lockdown with conditions if the pandemic allows. Photo: Christina Bendigs
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Betsy Peymann set up an online shop in the first lockdown. She warns not to disregard retail processes. Photo: Christina Bendigs
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Involve the customer in the packaging
Sabine Große from Intersport is annoyed with mountains of packaging waste. Online sales have always been made via their own portal. Due to the two lockdowns, she is now also selling on Amazon and Zalando. Customers make great use of it. However: it is not really profitable. Because the packaging and shipping costs decrease the profit margin. “If I send a shoe for 200 euros and it comes back, I’ll pay almost a quarter of the price for shipping and packaging,” she says. In the case of small items such as gloves, the loss could be even higher in proportion.
On a Monday, 300 parcels piled up that were returned, another 300 had to be prepared for shipping. On the other working days, the entrepreneur and her team send around 70 packages a day. They consciously use cardboard boxes twice, for the sake of the environment. It is important that customers read the description of articles correctly or take advice over the phone. “This is how we can prevent us from sending the wrong things,” she says. Without online trading, she would have had to give up her business. And even with it is just enough. She will not be able to hold out for a long period of time, says the entrepreneur. “The oven will be out at the end of February.” Nonetheless, she is already thinking ahead: “When the Corona is over and things have smoothed out, the end consumers will have to share in the costs of packaging and shipping for online retail,” she says, “only in this way the inner cities can be saved and the ecological pollution reduced ”, she is convinced.
Parcel service by bike
Betsy Peymann also thinks about the environment. Your start-up company, which combines sustainable fashion with a café, celebrated its first birthday shortly before the first lockdown. The company will be two years old on March 1, 2021. After a good start in the first year, Betsy Peymann, who has always found self-employment to be desirable, would find it regrettable if she could not find out how the third year would have been for her company. Already in the first lockdown she opened an online shop.
She drives out parcels within Magdeburg by bicycle. If it goes beyond the city limits, she uses the post office. She would like decision-makers to take into account the pandemic regulations that processes are taking place in retail and that spring collections have been purchased that cannot now be sold. She herself repeatedly puts unsold items of clothing on sale. But that is not possible with large fashion stores. She also calls for differentiation. The owner-managed shops in particular do not have as much customer traffic as the large shopping centers and can implement requirements more easily.
Men are demand customers
Franz-Josef Lohmeier, who bought the traditional store “Schreiber und Sundermann” in 2005, tries almost without online offers. The business has probably never seen a situation like this in 117 years. He is also in his shop regularly to keep track of the day. Without customers, however, that would be strange. He answers telephone inquiries, and he has already sold one or the other part. But the income goes to zero. He hopes the lockdown will end soon – I have invested in order to be able to comply with hygiene regulations and would be happy to open under certain conditions. Men are demand customers. But Franz-Josef Lohmeier is convinced that people wanted to go out again and just go window shopping.
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