Zara goes global: reaches 202 markets online

Inditex conquers the globe. The Spanish giant, which has set as its goal to sell online all around the globe with all its chains by 2020, is currently present in 202 different territories with its top brand Zara. The chain has led the group’s expansion waiting for the smaller chains to do the same in the next two years.

In order to fulfil its objective, Zara took a step forward last November with the release of zara.com/ww, a global platform with which it sells to smaller markets or those in which the group does not have physical presence.

The group achieved in record time the objective it set itself in September, when Pablo Isla announced in Milan the company’s plans to reach the whole world online in a two-year tenure.

Inditex launched a global online platform in October with which it reached 106 new markets

With the new web, Zara acquired 106 new online markets, among which there are Angola, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ghana, as well as some areas of the Caribbean and Indonesia. The platform’s orders are remitted from the Spanish web and will be received in a term of between three and seven days, depending on the destiny.

The challenge now resides on the replication of the same model for the other eight chains of the group, which are progressively implanting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in its whole network of stores in order to improve omnichannel integration and stock management.

Furthermore, the group is also spreading its automatized pick-up points for online orders, a system which it already put to test last year in a Zara store inside the department store Marineda City in Spain, and which is currently present in some stores located in Bilbao, Amsterdam, Milan, Glasgow, Liverpool and Leicester, as well as in the renewed Zara Haussman, in Paris, which reopens tomorrow.

Parallelly to its online approach, the group has kept on reordering its network of stores, which amounts up to 7,442 stores in 96 markets, 62 less than those registered last year. During the last quarter, however, the company has enlarged its stores network after shrinking it for the previous three periods adding a total of twenty net openings. 

Inditex came relatively late to the online sales channel, testing it out first through Zara Home in 2007. Zara’s e-commerce platform, on the other hand, did not take place until 2010, although during recent years the group has quickly stepped up its “completely integrated” strategy.

Inditex ended the first nine months of the fiscal year with a net profit of 2.43 billion euros, up by 4%. The company explains that it managed to correct the evolution of its gross margin as it managed to avoid the participation “in the promotional activity widely seen in the sector since September”. The company had a revenue of 18.43 billion euros between February and October, 3% more than in the same period of 2017.