Fung Group launches world's first retail business model testing platform in Shanghai

Hong Kong-based retailer and supply chain manager Fung Group has launched the world's first retail business model testing platform in Shanghai to track consumer behaviour.

The Explorium project is a collaborative effort by Fung Group, IBM and brand activation company Pico, which is also the world's largest exhibition organiser.

It is located at a 250,000 sq ft exhibition space at LiFung Plaza in Shanghai's Minhang district and features temporary pop-up stores for 35 international brands.

Unlike conventional shopping malls, the laboratory, as Fung Group chairman Victor Fung Kwok-king describes it, will only allow registered members to visit, enabling the project to track how customers behave inside the facility.

"Everybody knows that bricks-and-mortar retailing is really affected by e-commerce," Fung said yesterday. "Contrary to a lot of talk that this will be replaced by e-commerce, our view is that the future is the merging of conventional retailing and e-commerce."

He said there were a number of steps in the purchasing process and for each of these steps, customers wanted to switch "seamlessly" between online and offline.