Future thoughts

Who seeks, and will not take, when once ’tis offer’d,
Shall never find it more

I bought a new kettle and toaster the other day. Bear with me, gentle readers, for this will, I promise become relevant.

When the existing one decided to die after three years – falling, of course, the wrong side of the warranty, I could have plumped for another £15 option from the Argos concession at Sainsburys during the weekly shop. The last three kettles and toasters have been acquired that way. They all last about the same amount of time.

This time, biting the bullet, a lovely shiny, pale blue, kitchen-décor-matching option was purchased, along with the toaster because, that was clearly on its way out too. Not from Argos, nor from my middle-class, middle-aged female heartland of John Lewis, but from an online marketplace. This one happened to be run by Boots, picked because it got me a shed load of Advantage card points, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t stocked, picked and shipped by Boots. It may well have come from the same supplier it would have done had I picked any of the marketplace options that Google threw up in answer to my search.

Marketplace, in the online sense, has been one of those growth areas for businesses that have really taken off quietly. Amazon has been doing it for years, now B&Q, and, it appears, Boots, have taken it on. Had I been in the market for a new toilet seat, or some cement, and decided for whatever reason to buy them online from B&Q online, they would, in fact, have been sourced via B&Q Marketplace. It turns out that I know, quite well, the companies from whom that toilet-seat and cement would have come.

This all fits in with one of the presentations from the BMF Members Day last week. Seve Collinge, he of the Insight group, has been working with the BMF to produce a report on what the builders’ merchants branch of the future might look like. The report is out next month, and his presentation is available via the BMF’s website. There’s more to it than this of course, but it boils down to, the customer is changing, and merchants need to change in order to continue to met those customers’ needs. That will probably mean more online ordering, invoicing, and delivering goods when and where the new modern customers require them. That might be via Deliveroo-type third party delivery systems, clock-and-collect, or even out-of-hours lockers. It works a treat for my Vinted-addiction, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for plumbers’ bits. If there’s an opportunity to meet the needs of a wider range of customers, and doing so won’t sabotage existing business, then why wouldn’t you take advantage of systems like Marketplace.

That said, although not every customer will want to pop into the branch for a chat,  coffee and bit of trade counter banter, but some of them will, so it’s important that, in the future, the baby hasn’t gone the way of the bathwater.

To be honest though, many of these ‘new’ options aren’t that new. There are merchants out who have been exploring new routes to market for years. It’s why, despite everything, they are still around.

Time to use my shiny new kettle. Never did work out why the last one broke…