The pandemic has brought with it huge challenges and changes to the retail landscape in Portugal. One of them goes by the name of Dark StoresThese are shops or small warehouses, typically in urban centres/clusters of online consumers, where no customers enter and which serve only as a logistics warehouse for e-commerce.
The restrictions imposed over the last year and a half on traditional commerce have caused consumers to turn to e-commerce.
This is underlined by the INE (National Statistics Institute), which recently revealed that between August and October 2021, 40.4% of Portuguese between the ages of 16 and 74 shopped online, which reflects an increase of 5.2 percentage points compared to the same period in 2020. If we look at the total for the last year, the percentage is even more significant, at around 51.6%.
What are Dark Stores?
This exponential growth in e-commerce eventually led to constraints on the retail sector, which was not prepared to deal with such a huge increase in the volume of orders, eventually leading to the emergence of the concept of Dark Store.
Equipped with sufficient infrastructure to house products and equipment and begin the process of sorting, packaging and labelling orders, thus responding to the requests made, the Dark Stores their main objective is to shorten the distance between the product and the end consumer, allowing same-day or next-day deliveries.
More agile and closer to the end customer, these spaces are even more different from traditional logistics spaces - usually large and located far from cities - due to their smaller size and privileged location close to large urban centres, resembling ordinary shops or warehouses, but where customers don't enter.
This effort to bring online businesses closer to the end consumer is, in fact, one of the great challenges of the "new" retail, which could already be appreciated in the case of the online payment methods which, as a result of efforts to develop payment solutions more in line with consumer habits, has provided retailers with services such as the REDUNIQ E-Commerce and REDUNIQ@Payments.
The first of these means of online payment allows an online shop to receive e-commerce payments from customers all over the world, with Visa and Mastercard debit and credit cards, by MB WAY and ATM reference, with no membership costs or monthly fees. In relation to REDUNIQ @PaymentsThis is a ready-to-use solution for accepting remote payments by Visa and Mastercard, ATM reference and MB WAY. It is aimed at sells online without a website through social networks or marketplaces, allowing this type of business to receive online payments by email, SMS or WhatsApp.
Back to Dark StoresAlthough this concept is not aimed at face-to-face sales, there are some shops that keep spaces open to the end consumer, but they tend to reduce the retail space, capitalising on it as a storage area in order to respond more promptly to the online consumer.
In some cases, these shops can also act as parcel collection points, allowing consumers to collect the products they have bought online.
As they are located in densely populated areas, opening a Dark Store can pose some problems in terms of real estate, since the cost per square metre of land in urban areas is much higher, and cities currently don't have large, warehouse-like spaces to house this new concept. However, in order to counteract this situation, many businesses are betting on converting or adapting their physical shops into Dark Stores.
Dark Stores to be regulated
The growth in the number of Dark Stores in Portugal and the expected opening of new spaces of this type in the coming months, such as Glovo's investment in 16 Dark Stores and the entry into our country of Bolt Market (a business model based on Dark Stores), will lead the government to take steps to regulate them.
The news was given by João Torres, Secretary of State for Trade, Services and Consumer Defence, during a lunch-debate organised by the Association of Retail and Restaurant Brands. According to him, the government is working on it,
"in the revision of the legal framework for trade, services and catering activities, so that we can update our legislation and bring it into line with the current situation and the new realities of trade that surround us today and which are not always so visible, as is the case with Dark Stores or other warehousing logistics points."
For João Torres, these new formats are,
"also proof of the dynamism and permanent evolution of these sectors, both in terms of retail and catering."
since restaurants have also decided to bet on this concept by opening "Dark Kitchens", kitchens designed solely for deliveries.
