TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION AND INNOVATIONS IN RETAIL INDUSTRY
Retailers never had an issue with the collecting of data, rather than using it or providing solutions to it, Predictive Analytics changes everything to make smart retailing decisions for the following factors like purchasing & inventory reports, understanding consumer behavior to avail discounts or offers based on customer interests and preferences. Big Data or Data Analytics Specialists can give their best to create solutions. Big data analytics and Natural language processing tools are automated the data submission from the email or purchases history and sends follow ups and reactivation emails for abundance of data.
Whether it might be online or offline shopping, social involvement is huge these days, it is all about involving other in our purchasing, there are many social platforms encouraging people with modern influencers and communities like in Instagram, FB and Pinterest. Social shopping is not only limited to online, even influencing offline buyers also by Researching in Online and purchasing offline. Many of the brands already started their own social media platforms to influence wide range of audience. API and Digital Marketing Specialist together will assist retail industries.
Data privacy is the primary concern of any business particularly to retail industry, which includes ID’s, Payment Cards, Geo-location, Medical Prescriptions, and complete history of the customer. Almost all the retailers already implemented consumer privacy protection strategies with GDPR and CCPA regulations, some of them are still behind in this area, Cybersecurity specialists are really helpful and their services are in high demand to protect data from hackers and attacks.
Recommendation Engines are running invisible in back-end, it will be filtered based on the customer search or interest or wish-list and few are like smart offers based on customer preferences belongs to age, geographic and community groups. Some of the major retailers like Amazon introduced personalized recommendations technologies, few other are still working to increase their revenue. It will operate with the help of AI and machine learning algorithms.
IoT Technology cut-down the manual labor by introducing new strategies like Improving automation in warehouse and supply chain management, optimized product placement, Robot Employees etc. It will be useful to get better results. Robots and Chatbots are handling customer communications.
The reason behind introducing eWallets is simple, flexible, and secure payment needs will result faster payment and convenience of a customer. Digital payment platforms are now working with one click purchases like touch id and face recognition’s. ePayments are integrated using blockchain technologies. Retailers savings increased by using digital payment methods with lower transaction fees.
Approximately 10% of the customers in US are using voice assistants for their shopping using Voicebots, mostly Apple Siri, Google Home, Amazon Alexa. Lot more retailers adapted to these technologies and integrating their product information with voice search options, which will save lot of time and hands-free way of search. Technologies like natural language processing and omnichannel retail strategies are useful for retailers to implement.
Customers can snap a photo of a product, it will redirect to the retailer’s website link, who all are providing similar kind of products. Many of the retailers are introducing this tool, but not widely, some of them are still working on it to implement. Some of the companies like Pinterest and Instagram invested on visual search technology to turn the smartphone camera into a search engine for products.
5G offers the higher speed than 4G, certainly affect the future of retailers. New features such as AR, VR, and Voice/Visual Search needs higher connectivity from our phone, which 5G provides. 5G consumes less energy, due to this retailer’s, who will use Robots and IoT devices can experience prolonged battery life.
Researches saying that Retail industries are investing huge amount on AI in coming years. AI and machine learning solutions increases the customer experience with the help of chatbots and robots with exact information instead of approximation. AI and ML systems are working widely and enabling recommendations, store navigation’s, Customer measurements/sizes, improves logistics management, measuring marketing information, and smarter business decisions. Retailers may see creative changes in coming years and AI plays major role in it.
AR and VR gives feel in real life trials of online shopping. Some of the restaurants and eye-wear retailers widely using these two options and increasing customer experience in analyzing store behavior, sending push notifications and location-based advertising. Sales are increased significantly with these options.
Retailers are trying to develop browser-based/web applications on Xamarin or Flutter for greater usage along with Android/iOS. Those will increase the app responsive rate, easy updating in background, adaptable to framework, work effectively low internet bandwidth, easily found in all search engines, and integrates with other relevant apps, if necessary.
When compared to old system designs, microservices architecture designs are domain friendly. It avoids large software systems into services, which developed and integrated with other services through an API. Programming language would be differed based on the platform and easy integration with the cloud.
Geo-location technology has changed the way stores communicate and engaging with their customers. Google and other search engines easily locating the stores or customer locations for retail business needs. Phones mostly helping and solving the needs, more than 80% of smartphone, utilizing this option when they are not sure of the store location or customer location at the time of delivery.
Omnichannel is nothing but a type of retail, integrates the various ways of shopping available to consumer using online or in any physical store. Future will invest on omnichannel marketing communication strategies for better experience. They also communicate through social media and messaging platforms
Drones for external delivery and Driver-less cars are for within the warehouses and port facilities. Major advantage of autonomous delivery solutions does not depend on business hours, also no need of skillful drivers and can expect same day delivery.
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