Going to a German shop to buy something is, more often than not, no longer the most efficient option. Order a book online. Compare dozens of brands and hundreds of reviews before buying running shoes. Check dimensions and prices in an app before buying furniture. Even clothes, beauty products and sportswear — categories you used to have to try on in person — can increasingly be researched, chosen and purchased entirely online.
Which raises a real question: once "getting the product" no longer requires walking into a shop, why would a German consumer still go out, get in the car, find parking, and walk through the door?
This question matters more than it used to, because the real issue facing German physical retail may no longer be "will online replace offline." It's something more concrete: if consumers no longer need to come here for the product itself, what can a physical store actually offer them?
Looking at several German consumer surveys alongside a handful of retail cases currently playing out on the ground, the answer becomes fairly clear. The physical store is finding three new reasons to exist: Digital Convenience × Physical Experience × Community — digital handles efficiency, experience creates a reason to linger, and community builds the relationship.
1. German consumers haven't given up on physical stores — but they've brought internet-level expectations into them
In 2025, Germany's digital association Bitkom ran a representative survey of 1,180 internet users aged 16 and up, asking a genuinely useful question: what would make physical retail more appealing to you? The top answers weren't nicer interiors or more products. They were: 74% wanted to be able to reserve items online in advance; 73% wanted to check stock availability online before visiting; and 71% wanted to be able to pay cashless anywhere, anytime — up from 61% just a year earlier, a 10-point jump in twelve months.
That shift is worth paying attention to, because it shows German consumers aren't simply choosing between "online" and "offline." They've carried the habits online shopping built into the physical world with them: they want to know before they go whether something's in stock, they don't want to make a wasted trip, they want to book ahead, they don't want to queue once they arrive, and paying should be as frictionless as it is on a phone.
In other words, it's not that consumers no longer need physical stores. It's that they're no longer willing to put up with friction the internet has already solved, just because they're standing in a shop. So the first layer of change in physical retail isn't about adding experience — it's about fixing efficiency first.
2. "Digital" isn't the same thing as "online"
This is one of the most important things to understand about retail today. Many companies, when they talk about digitisation, still default to thinking of it as online stores, apps, e-commerce, social media. But digital and online aren't the same thing — digitisation can happen inside a physical store just as easily.
A customer might discover a product on their phone, check nearby store stock online, reserve it, go try it in person, pay by phone, either collect it in-store or have it delivered home, then handle any after-sales issue online. Somewhere in that sequence, it stops being meaningful to ask which step was "online" and which was "offline." The customer, frankly, doesn't care — they just want whichever path is most convenient right now. That's why asking "online or offline" about German physical retail today is already becoming the wrong question. Consumers have been moving fluidly between both worlds for a while now.
3. But digital can only answer "why is this more convenient" — not "why should I come at all"
This is where physical retail's real difficulty lies. A store that offers stock lookup, reservations, mobile payment and click-and-collect is undeniably more convenient than it used to be. But a customer can still reasonably ask: then why not just have it delivered?
Which pushes the question into a second layer: what does physical space actually offer that a phone screen can't? One clear answer emerging in the German market is experience. In its research on the future of physical retail, PwC Germany has described stores increasingly evolving into showrooms and social venues. Customers step into physical space not just to face more shelves, but to experience the product, get expert advice and service, and do the things that are genuinely hard to do online. At that point, a store's value shifts from "how much product is here" to "what can I actually do by coming here."
4. Stores can get smaller, even as the boundaries of experience get bigger
There's an interesting small running store in Berlin called Optimistic Runners, on Torstraße. By floor space alone, it's nowhere close to a giant flagship sports store. But its own description of itself is direct: More than just a shop.
Beyond selling running apparel, the store serves as a meeting point for its running club and a venue for community events. What's most interesting isn't some expensive indoor track or a wall of "experiential retail" tech. Customers gather at the store — and then go running. Berlin's streets become the experience space. They come back to the store once the run is done. A tiny physical footprint gets stretched into an entire city.
Which points to a trend I think is easy to overlook: a store's footprint doesn't have to keep growing for the experience to grow. The usual instinct when people picture an "experience store" is more square metres, a pricier fit-out, more elaborate installations. Optimistic Runners shows a different possibility — the store is just the start and end point. The city itself is the experience.
5. Customers can show up every week without buying anything at all
OYSHO's approach in Berlin makes this logic even clearer. Alongside opening its store at Berlin Hackescher Markt, the brand launched its own running club. Its first session followed a simple format: gather and drop off belongings at the store at 18:30, set off at 18:45, run and work out 3–5km through the city, and return to the store at 19:45 for a post-run social.
This wasn't a one-off launch event. OYSHO Berlin still runs a weekly running club, the brand operates similar running communities across more than 22 cities in Europe, and it connects offline activity with a digital community through its own training app.
This solves a problem traditional retail struggles with: why would someone come when they don't need to buy anything? The running club answers it directly — today isn't about buying clothes at all, it's about going for a run. But from the brand's side, the result is that the customer still has weekly contact with it: gathering at the store, seeing new arrivals, getting to know the coach, meeting other runners, using the app, showing up for the next session. Maybe nothing gets bought this week. Maybe nothing gets bought next week either. But three months later, when she needs a new running top, she's no longer facing an unfamiliar brand. At that point, what the store is optimising for shifts from a transaction to a relationship.
6. The best experiences don't necessarily happen inside the store
This is also why I think the term "experience store" gets misunderstood so often. When most brands say "experience store," the first things that come to mind are fit-out, big screens, lighting, a photo wall, coffee — a set of features that feel very "new retail." None of that is actually the same thing as an experience. The real question is why a customer would want to spend an extra thirty minutes here — or further still, why would they come at all if they're not buying anything today?
Sports brands see this especially clearly. A running shoe is designed in an R&D lab and sold in a shop, but where it actually gets proven is on the street. A store can shift from being a display space for products to being an entry point into a product experience — the customer tries the shoe on, then actually runs through the city in it. Product, body, city and brand form a real connection in that moment, and it's far more persuasive than a giant LED screen in-store telling customers "our brand loves sport."
7. This logic isn't limited to sports brands
If community retail only worked for running clubs, it wouldn't really count as a trend worth paying attention to. But the German market has produced other answers.
Globetrotter sells outdoor gear — customers can obviously buy a jacket, backpack or hiking boots online — so some of its stores have added repair workshops, secondhand sales, equipment services, talks, workshops, and a community space it calls the "Clubhütte." A customer's relationship with the store shifts accordingly: buy the gear, learn how to use it, join an event, meet other people who love the outdoors, bring broken gear back for repair, send old gear into secondhand, buy again before the next trip. That's no longer a simple purchase path — it's closer to an ongoing relationship loop. The brand stops waiting for the customer to come back only when they next need to buy something. It starts creating reasons for them to come back.
8. Even bookshops are doing the same thing
A book might be one of the easiest products to replace with e-commerce. A book with a given ISBN is identical whether bought online or in a physical shop — so why does a bookshop still matter?
German bookshop chain Thalia's answer, in part, is also community: author meet-and-greets, reading events, a booklover festival, activities for children, fan events. A customer walking into the shop isn't necessarily there just to get a book — they might be there to meet an author, talk to other people who love the same book, join a themed event, or bring their kid into a space built around reading. Amazon can put a book on someone's doorstep, but it can't fit an author, a reader, a city and a community into that same box. That's what physical space still has.
9. A store no longer even needs to carry the job of "stocking everything here"
Digitisation has produced another shift: stores can get smaller.
In June 2026, IKEA opened its first compact-format store in Germany, in Ingolstadt. A typical IKEA store averages roughly 35,000 square metres; this one is about 2,950. Around 2,690 items are available to take home directly from the store, while the full IKEA range of roughly 10,000 products can be ordered through digital channels, alongside personal planning consultations, delivery and collection services.
That shift matters. A traditional large-format retail space carries four functions at once — showroom, inventory, consultation and transaction. Once digitised, those four things no longer have to happen in the same place: inventory can sit in a distribution centre, the broader SKU range can live online, the transaction can happen on a phone, and the product can be delivered straight to someone's door. That frees up expensive square metres for experience, consultation, inspiration and human interaction. It points to a slightly counterintuitive direction for the future of retail: as product range grows, the store itself can shrink — because the digital world carries the breadth, and physical space carries the depth.
10. From "a place that sells things" to "a place with a reason to visit"
Put these cases side by side, and they're all doing the same thing. Optimistic Runners turns the store into the starting point of a running community. OYSHO gives customers a weekly reason to return through sport. Globetrotter turns an outdoor-gear shop into a hub for knowledge, repair, circular consumption and an outdoor community. Thalia turns a bookshop into a cultural space where authors and readers actually connect. IKEA hands the consultation, experience and inspiration that digital channels can't provide back to physical space.
Underneath all of it sits a fairly clear model:
| Three layers of new physical retail value | What consumers actually need | What the store delivers |
|---|---|---|
| Digital Convenience | Fast, transparent, low friction | No wasted trips, no queuing, freedom to switch channels |
| Physical Experience | Touch, try, feel, get advice | Turning a product from a screen image into a real experience |
| Community & Belonging | Interest, connection, belonging | A standing reason to keep coming back |
These three layers don't replace each other — they stack. Digital strips out the time that has no value. Experience gives customers a reason to stop. Community gives them a reason to return.
11. Physical retail will increasingly compete not only on sales per square metre, but also on "return rate"
Traditional retail cares deeply about revenue per square metre, and that metric isn't going anywhere — rent still has to be paid, staff still need salaries, and a store still ultimately needs to turn a profit. But once a physical space starts carrying brand experience, customer acquisition, membership, service, community and online order fulfilment all at once, judging it purely on "how much did this person spend today" starts to miss most of the picture.
A customer joins a running club today and spends €0. Next month, she orders a piece of activewear online. Two months later, she brings a friend to an event. Six months later, she buys a pair of shoes in-store. Who does that value actually belong to — the store, e-commerce, marketing, CRM, or community? Once consumers stop living inside a company's internal channel structure, a business that keeps calculating online and offline as entirely separate ledgers will find it increasingly hard to see what a physical store is actually worth.
12. What this means for foreign brands preparing to enter Germany
When a brand used to think about physical retail in Germany, the first questions were usually: where do we open, how big, what's the rent, what's the fit-out budget, how many SKUs, how many staff. Those questions still matter. But before any of them, it may be worth answering three others first: why would a customer walk in the first time? Why would they want to stay an extra thirty minutes? Why would they come back next month?
If the honest answer to all three is "because that's where they can buy our product," the store probably hasn't found its real reason to exist in the e-commerce era — because getting the product was never the hard part. The internet solved that a long time ago.
13. Once buying no longer requires a store, the store gets to become interesting again
E-commerce didn't simply kill physical retail. What it took first was the store's most basic, most easily replaced function: getting hold of a product. And that's exactly what's forcing physical retail to answer a harder question: if it's not just about selling things, what else can I be?
The future of competitive physical retail probably isn't about keeping the internet out. It's about handing the internet what it's genuinely good at — efficiency, inventory, information, transactions — over to digital systems, and taking back what the physical world is genuinely good at: people, space, the body, experience and relationships. A store can keep getting smaller while the boundaries of its experience keep getting bigger. And once buying something no longer requires a trip to the store, "why is it worth coming" is the one question a store actually has to answer.
Sources
Consumer data in this article is drawn primarily from Bitkom's representative survey on consumer demand for digital services in physical retail. Case studies are based on publicly available brand and company information, including OYSHO Community and IKEA Germany. Frameworks referenced in this piece — "Digital Convenience × Physical Experience × Community," "Store → City → Experience → Community → Store," and "Customer Relationship Loop" — are analytical frameworks derived from these public cases, not original models published by the organisations cited.