Smaller price difference contributes to recovery of off-line stores

As the Chinese lunar New Year is drawing near, people have been shopping. But compared to the huge sales gap between online and off-line stores in previous years, performances of off-line stores rebounded this year thanks to the narrowing price difference, reports the People's Daily.

Alibaba's Taocafe, a store without cashiers and lines in Hangzhou city, Zhejiang Province attracts many customers. [Photo: China.org.cn]

Last year, sales of 2700 enterprises covering various industries reached a year-on-year growth rate of 4.6% on average , up 3 percentage points compared to that of 2016, according to statistics unveiled by the Ministry of Commerce.

Online stores also kept a good momentum last year with total retail sales of 7.2 trillion yuan (1.1 trillion USD), an increase of 32.2% year-on-year.

The competition between online and off-line retail is not a zero-sum game, said Li Keao, an economic researcher at Tsinghua University. The poor financial numbers of traditional retail over the past several years was the result of benign competition and in a changing business landscape. But after adjustment, off-line retailors have regained some of that lost popularity among customers through new operation patterns and smaller price differences compared to online shopping.

A white-collar worker named Cai Wei bought a hair dryer at an off-line home appliance store. He said he found the price at the off-line store is a little bit cheaper than its online flag store, and he can check the quality and buy at once at the physical store.

A great sale put on by Alipay on December 12, 2017 attracted crowds of customers to rush to purchase goods. [Photo: VCG]