Online to offline

Online to offline, commonly abbreviated to O2O, is a phrase that is used in digital marketing to describe systems enticing consumers within a digital environment to make purchases of goods or services from physical businesses.

What's O2O

O2O means "Online To Offline" but also "Offline to Online", indicating the two-way flow between the online and the physical world, especially retail and ecommerce, but also between brand marketing and shopper or point-of-sale marketing efforts to influence purchase decisions. For example, consumers could see an ad online and be driven to visit the store, or be in a physical store but ultimately purchase online for a variety of reasons (selection, price, convenience, etc). There are many aspects to O2O, and businesses are increasingly challenged to satisfy consumers' expectations of a frictionless flow.

Initially, the term was applied to QR code marketing efforts, but has since evolved. It is often confused with omni-channel, which refers to companies with an online store as well as physical retail locations.

Often, O2O implies an online trigger which prompts the customer to go to a physical location to complete their purchase, but it can also be the other way around: One aspect of newer O2O initiatives is the ability to pay online and then pick up a product in an offline place, such as the retailers' physical store or 3rd party locations. Another O2O feature is returning items purchased online to the retailers' offline location.

example: Alibaba’s first mall shows that O2O is a real business model.[1][2][3]

Criticism

In its early use, the phrase received criticism as illogical. However, its mass adoption has dulled much of this criticism.

gollark: What might actually be useful is GPS with signed responses to prevent spoofing.
gollark: > Oh no, they'll have to spend a whole 32 gold making their own.More realistically, oh no, they will have to spend about 10 seconds sniffing for the password.
gollark: You could probably do auth vaguely decentrally, if you don't mind not having a centralized username/UUID registry.
gollark: I see.
gollark: How is the madefor.cc landing page going? I can interweb™ design somewhat so could help.

See also

References
  1. "Definition of O2O". PC Magazine.
  2. "What does O2O mean for the future of e-commerce?". Yahoo Finance.
  3. "Training Bundle". Sunday, February 23, 2020
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