Seeing people on smartphones is nothing new, but by you’ve likely seen lots of folks — most of them pretty young — wandering around parks, shopping centers, libraries, and campuses staring intently at their screens. It’s all thanks to Pokemon GO, the augmented reality game that burst onto the scene in a way we haven’t seen in a long time.
Create a world-class store experience with mobile- and cloud-first tools for store associates.
Disruption–transformation–reinvention. Buzzwords floating around as retailers, experts, and thought leaders speculate on the evolution of the physical retail store and how technology will play a role in this change. At the store-level, we’re seeing retailers experiment with beacons, kiosks, and digital displays to augment consumer’s access to product inventory and assistance.
From the moment a shopper clicks “buy,” the anticipation builds. She tracks her package from order confirmation to shipping notifications to the moment it arrives on her doorstep. She may even share a picture of the package with her friends, comment on the retailer’s forum or watch unboxing videos online.
Determining exactly when to have a sale, how long it should last, and how much to discount are recurring challenges for every retailer. One way to gain the upper hand is to have easy access to data-backed insights on your competitors’ promotional tactics at your fingertips. Such insights can reveal how your promotional calendar compares to others’, how discounting affects traffic, and how your promotions benchmark against competitors’.
We’re excited for Bob Phibbs — the acclaimed speaker, writer, and CEO of the Retail Doctor, a New York-based retail consultancy — to be in Chicago later this week, where he will deliver the keynote speech at this year’s Retail Summit.
DeepMind – an artificial intelligence (AI) company that Google acquired in 2014 – recently garnered headlines with its groundbreaking AI achievement. DeepMind succeeded in creating a machine learning program, called AlphaGo, that recently crushed one of the one of the world’s top players, Lee Sedol, at an ancient strategic board game called “Go.”
Savvy retailers know that an engaged workforce is key to driving customer satisfaction, operational performance, and ultimately, business success. In a recent examination of human capital trends, 85 percent of executives identified employee engagement as an important or very important priority for their organizations. But according to Gallup, only 26 percent of retail employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs.
The ubiquity of the smartphone, which in the US has more than tripled since 2010, has had an enormous impact on retailers and how they interact with their customers. One of the most significant retail trends created by the mobile era is customer demand for free Wi-Fi.
Innovative Retail Technologies caught up with Hedgie Bartol, business development manager for retail at Axis Communications, about Security-as-a-Service and whether it is beneficial to retailers of all sizes. Bartol addresses cloud-based security and how secure it really is.
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