Peter’s Sea Market is a family-owned business operating in the seafood retailing sector in Korea. Confronted with a lack of digital skills amongst their workforce and other difficulties related to ecommerce during the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter’s Sea Market has now started to upskill its workforce in order to sell online.
Korean seafood store digitally upskilled to transform into an online B2C distribution platform
Abstract
Background
Peter’s Sea Market is a long-running family-owned enterprise that operates in the seafood retailing sector in Korea. The firms’ CEO, Jongho Lee, aims to evolve the business into a more digitalised online Business to Consumer (B2C) distribution platform.
Challenge
During the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the digitalisation process of Peter’s Sea Market met two main barriers: the firm found it challenging to prepare their employees to use digital tools within a short period of time and to digitally organise their sales and stock data which have traditionally been hand-written on paper.
Digitalisation Path
Peter’s Sea Market shifted towards a more hybrid-retail business model. In Korea, the share of SMEs with a website allowing for online ordering has gradually increased over the past years and was at 28,5% in the case of medium enterprises and 30% in that of small enterprises in 2020, above the OECD averages of 25% and 21% respectively for each type of business (OECD, 2021[1]). Since the creation of Peter’s Sea Market, Jongho Lee’s family has run the firm as a seafood wholesaler through a traditional brick-and-mortar store. After Jongho Lee became CEO, this business started its digital transformation journey with the goal of turning into a fully online seafood platform.
Approach
To overcome these difficulties, Peter’s Sea Market underwent an upskilling journey to increase the digital skills of its employees, focussing on those at the managerial level. Specifically, managers underwent Kakao Classes, and began actively utilizing many of Kakao's partner tools, such as Talk Deal, Talk Store main page design research, and Kakao Talk Channel. Kakao is a Korean service provider offering digital services and products from instant messaging to fintech and entertainment, and one of the D4SME private sector partners.
Government Support
Peter’s Sea Market has not participated in any government (national or local) programmes and is unaware if there are initiatives that could be relevant to them.
To learn more about SMEs digital transformation
OECD (2021), The Digital Transformation of SMEs, OECD Studies on SMEs and Entrepreneurship, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/bdb9256a-en.
OECD (2021), SME Digitalisation to Build Back Better, https://doi.org/10.1787/f493861e-en
References
[1] OECD (2021), ICT Access and Usage by Businesses, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ICT_BUS# (accessed on 15 November 2022).
