Charles Pittaway, Managing Director of Sage Pay.
When you try on clothing, you do so in the change room; if a dress you bought doesn’t fit or you change your mind, you barter it and, with any luck, afterwards money has afflicted hands, you’ll get some change back.
Did you apperceive that, historically, a ‘change’ was a abode area merchants met to do business?
Ironically, we’re on the bend of massive change in the retail industry, apprenticed by unstoppable agenda disruption, new technologies, and alteration customer demands and arcade habits.
E-commerce boomAccording to the Salesforce Arcade Index, agenda business grew 19% year-over-year in the aboriginal division of 2016, with mobiles accounting for 52% of all arcade cartage and 30% of all orders. In South Africa, online absorb is accepted to abound to over R53 billion by 2018. Online absorb via mobiles added 65% amid 2015 and 2016, and is accepted to access by a massive 123% by 2018, presenting an befalling that bounded retailers cannot let slip.
Here are some of the better changes we apprehend to see in the retail industry in the advancing years:
· All the affiliated things. One of the capital allowances that the Internet of Things (IoT) brings to retail is the adeptness to optimise logistics, accumulation chains and inventory. With beacons, sensors and RFID tags, retailers can clue and trace not alone the movement of articles but additionally how they were advised and what accompaniment they’re in. The IoT additionally enables retailers to bear on the burning delight that consumers accept appear to expect. A move appear just-in-time retail requires lean, able processes that acquiesce retailers to serve barter bound and to hone-in on appeal and upsell to barter as they move through the store. In fact, IDC predicts that in-store contextual business will be one of the fastest-growing cross-industry IoT use cases amid now and 2021.
· Move to mobile. Retailers who don’t yet accept a arcade app are already on the aback foot. Give consumers a acceptable acumen to download your app by offering, for example, discounts on purchases fabricated through the app, or a agenda to redeem adjoin their aboriginal app purchase.
· Click and compare. Consumers are demography online artefact and appraisement allegory to a accomplished new level. 55% percent of consumers appetite to around appearance how a couch, for example, would fit in their lounge afore affairs it. Technologies like basic and aggrandized absoluteness acquiesce consumers to ‘try things on for size’ after anytime abrogation their homes and will acutely change the arcade experience.
· Click and connect. Consumers appetite new means to appoint with brands and products, and amusing media is acceptable more affecting for retailers who appetite to ambition new customers. Retailers are now demography it a footfall added by alms chargeless WiFi in stores, which enables them to aggregate abstracts about their barter and use that advice to clothier their business messages.
· Accomplish way for the bots. Chatbots, absolute bots, cobots… some retailers are already application apparatus acquirements and bogus intelligence to serve barter quicker and to accomplish personalised arcade recommendations: 37% of consumers accept acclimated a agenda abettor to body arcade lists or abode orders.
· More means to pay. The Sage Payments Landscape Report begin that consumers apprehend businesses to accommodate a ambit of acquittal options above acclaim and debit cards. Some bounded retailers accept started experimenting with cryptocurrencies and adaptable loans. 65% of consumers additionally say that online wallets accomplish a business assume avant-garde and progressive.
The approaching arcade acquaintance is personal, actual and manned by bots who can acquisition us absolutely what we want, in the appropriate colour and the appropriate size. And it will fit perfectly.
Wouldn’t that be nice, for a change?
By Charles Pittaway, Managing Director of Sage Pay
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