Fashion retailer, City Beach, was having a dream trading run until the late 1990s. After surviving the first hurdle into digital and embracing email as a marketing tool, City Beach hit a problem with its legacy automated marketing platform.

You may never have heard of New Era Cap Co, but you have probably seen its products, given they have been worn by celebrities and sporting luminaries from Jennifer Lopez to Babe Ruth.

​Physical stores are not dead. It is not only about either physical or digital stores, but how you seamlessly combine the two and deliver on customer experience, said Mark Teperson, chief digital officer at Accent Group at today’s Adobe Symposium in Sydney.

​What do you do when you are faced with a traditional retailer, who has been around for 118 years, that is in decline and unable to quickly effect change? You disrupt it from the inside, said Robbie Tutt, GM of Omni Channel at Myer, who spoke at the Online Retailer conference in Sydney last week about how he has set about turning around the beleaguered retailer’s fortunes.

The impending arrival of Amazon on Australian shores has left many brands and retailers scrambling to implement a response. And it’s the way in which Amazon will serve the market that arguably offers the biggest industry shake-up and reshape how consumers access products and services for brands and retailers alike.

It is up to traditional department stores like Myer to keep proving their relevance to consumers as omni-channel players as global giants like Amazon come to shake up Australia’s retail market, Myer’s CEO claims.

Increasing numbers of shoppers are choosing to make purchases online and are happy to share their location and mobile phone details with retailers in exchange for value.