London-based Doorda is the one-stop shop for reliable, ready-to-use data about UK properties, businesses, and geo-demographics. It aims to change the way retailers acquire and integrate data in the UK.
“We use patent-pending technology to provide the most comprehensive index of all UK buildings and addresses, past, present, and planned,” says Clifford McDowell, CEO, Doorda.
Data is now available in abundance. How do you segregate and authenticate it so that it enables business growth?
When everyone is using the same data to ask the same questions, everyone gets the same answer. But by adding an additional data sets above and beyond, one can actually gain real proper insights.
British retail giant ASDA leverages Doorda data to expand its “toyou” parcel services. ASDA uses location data and insights to understand the key drivers for site selections of new click-and-collect locations, as well as to better target important demographic and socioeconomic segments.
ASDA wanted to find an ideal location for lockers, which is permanently fixed outside the shopper’s home or near car parks so that when the parcel gets delivered and the shopper is not at home, the parcel sits safely in the locker rather than lying scattered on the floor.
To identify areas to install lockers, we gathered data like, where their target customers live, the income of the area, the crime rate of the area, traffic, the density of population, etc. We provide the data preconfigured based on location to which they can just upload that data, map it to their own internal data and they can quickly identify what they need and want to do.
What does your analysis say about the transformation in retail and commerce?
Currently, there is a trend of moving away from older office buildings. Smaller town centers have died quite heavily because office workers don’t go in during the day.
Certainly in the city of London, foot-traffic has gone down by about 25% on Mondays and Fridays as everyone is coming into the office only on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and working from home on the rest of the days.
Wednesday is the new Friday in London.
The busyness of certain locations are restricted to three days a week, instead of five. Also, the repurposing of office buildings has gone up about 30%, they are repurposed into flats or being completely demolished, then rebuilt.
In London, foot traffic has gone down by about 25% on Mondays and Fridays as everyone is coming into office only on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday & working from home on the rest of the days
There’s also a trend for people leaving e-commerce and also going back into high streets as well, especially looking at smaller shops. This is why the previously large department stores of several thousand square meters, are now being subdivided into individual units.
Our data gives us the ability to track all these changes in the business locations along with the repurposed ones. We see changes in growth and environments where previously it was about retail, and a lot of shops, it is now more about entertainment and experiences, a mixed-use environment, within town centers.
What technology trends do you see in the retail sector?
I think it’s the case of joining the data together. So when you go into a shop, you get offers and discounts. The Meta experiment has fallen flat on its face at the moment because most people are not going to sit in a room with a pair of VR headwear sets and experience it because people want to go out.
In the case of Currys, a large high street electrical retailer in the UK, people go in, look at a TV in the shop and then go online to check the price before making a decision.
Data also show that people prefer having a store nearby when they go in and ask direct questions. The trend is to have a high street presence to capture people’s attention and sell the quality of the value as opposed to just on the price because it is cheaper online.
What are your views on the role of location and business intelligence in retail industry?
If one looks at e-commerce and builds out a warehouse, and if that warehouse is in the middle of the countryside, nowhere near a motorway network, the delivery charges will automatically go up. Equally, one has to balance the density of the area, so getting a large warehouse in central London is not possible, but one may opt for smaller local hubs near a larger warehouse, which can feed supply.
That is one of the trends within the UK where there are empty retail units where people like Gorillas deliveries has ultrafast delivery points where one could receive their grocery orders within 15 minutes.
They are utilizing empty retail units to store a small selection of goods, which they can deliver within a half-mile to one-mile radius as quickly as possible. They identify storages which aren’t necessarily in the best location, but are easily accessible.
One of our customers is interested in identifying all pharmacies within a certain location and whilst we get large pharmacies such as Boots UK and Lloyds Pharmacy, there’s no singular list of all available on the internet.
By gathering the data sources we were able to pinpoint exactly where these pharmacies are. If someone wanted to put pharmacies near GP surgeries, our data helps to position them whilst not being too close to their competitors, but being handy for local public health services.
What do you think where the crowd is moving towards?
Recent data would suggest that we have reached peak e-commerce to quite a large extent. People assume that after pandemic, the trend would carry on, but certainly, the large food retailers in the UK, which account for about 30% of retail, have all experienced quite a large drop off in. While people are ordering online, they still want to go in a shop and pick a potato, and see what it feels like, which they are never going to achieve online.
The trend is towards openness, address-based information, and geodemographic features around climate change and flooding, and so on. In a few years a lot more exciting developments in mapping and climate analysis
The cost of the returns is going up, clothing retailers are making it more and more prohibitive for them to actually offer free delivery, which is why a lot of them now actually charge to return goods back to them, which means the value adds of everything being cheaper online is getting less and less, which is driving more people into the retail stores themselves. It is a mixed spike. E-commerce is obviously going to carry on the way it is now, but I don’t think it is going to destroy the high streak to the extent it has previously.
What are the future trends that you see in data aggregation?
The future trends in data aggregation are getting increasingly more common. I think certainly within the UK, as we move away from the EU restrictions, there is more data being released. The government is pushing for an open register of all owners of companies across the country.
Ordnance Survey making more road network data, their APIs, their 3D modeling, and all that data’s becoming more and more freely accessible to anyone in the marketplace. Ultimately, you would find that there is a completely public version of Google Maps, which is paid for and owned by the government, but accessible to individuals, there is also a central list of addresses, which is publicly available and accessible by everyone but is currently available to only certain cities within the UK.
The trend is towards openness, address-based information and geodemographic features, especially around climate change and flooding. I think in a few years there would be a lot more exciting developments in mapping and climate analysis.
