As a shopper, what do you use your mobile phone for most? I’m asking in the traditional retail, sense, of course — not the texting between social media sessions or weather checks (all of which can factor into retail shopping these days). But more in the sense of finding a store, or searching for merchandise, or creating a shopping list, or checking order status…
When Did Tech Companies Lose Their Point Of View?
As you know, we are right in the middle of conference season, and I’ve been pounding the pavement for the last few months, with another month ahead of me. Here’s a phrase I’ve heard over and over from the tech vendors I’ve visited, which has grown tiresome: “Any way they want it.” This is in reference to their (retail) clients, and to the vendor’s willingness to bend over backwards to get their retail clients whatever they need.
Small Retailers: A Dilemma For Tech Services Providers
RSR’s E-Commerce study indicated that small retailers place far higher hopes on digital than the largest retailers do as a way to secure their futures. While that may seem a little counterintuitive (after all, the largest retailers have the most wherewithal to develop the digital side of their selling environments), the smallest retailers see digital as a way to make the shopping experience more enjoyable for their consumers, and thus insulate themselves from large impersonal competitors that otherwise could crowd them out with their big assortments and super-low prices.
RBTE 2016: Retailers Must Be Digital Companies… With Stores
Consumers today have more disposable income, are more confident, are happy to shop across channels, and are more selective — but less loyal. He pointed out that while the state of the consumer is much more positive than one might pick up from the daily news cycle, people have retained the smart shopping habits that they developed in harder times.
Luxury Fashion Disrupted
The world is changing quickly, and no one, not even high end fashion brands, is immune to those changes. The new era, what I’ve started to call the “second phase of disruption” is tied to two things: the ascendancy of Millennials into their highest spending years, and fast fashion retailers’ ability to bring products to market four times faster than their competitors.
Don’t Let Procurement Negotiate Enterprise Software Deals – Part 1
“We have heard anecdotal stories of ‘procurement types’ as gatekeepers (to the software acquisition process). It was bad enough when retailers started using ‘procurement types’ to source merchandise, but to select technology? Seriously? Are any of you really doing this?”
2016: The Year Of…
So apparently I have a thing I do. I didn’t do it consciously, but I guess I have done it regularly: to declare the theme of the year in retail. I went back and looked at all of the articles I’ve written, and this trend started in 2009, when I declared it “the year of the customer”. Here are the rest of the years.
The Internet of Things, Retail, and Analytics: SAS Analyst Days 2016
I got my start in the software world through supply chain software, specifically supply chain execution management. And quickly found myself at ground zero of Walmart’s RFID mandate. As the entire technology industry groped around, trying to figure out how to really implement RFID in the supply chain, it quickly became clear that there was a huge gap between the constant pinging signals coming from RFID tags, and the execution systems that needed to ultimately capture the meaning of those signals.
The Future of Self Service In Stores Is Dire
Ever since RSR’s webinar on the NRF Big Show, one topic keeps cropping up over and over: self service in stores. To talk about this topic in any meaningful way, you first need to keep in mind that the need for self service in stores differs significantly by retail vertical. No one expects (or truly, wants) an employee following them around while filling a grocery basket, but they very much expect employee assistance when shopping for high end clothing, to put it in extreme terms. Will self service go away for convenience shopping in stores? Probably not. Will it invade high-end experiences? Probably not. But in between is a whole lot of ground.
NetSuite SuiteWorld: Harnessing The Genius Of AND
In the book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras spoke about the “genius of AND”. The basic idea is that companies who define their capabilities or their markets as exclusionary choices are limiting themselves. The real power comes when companies embrace the contradiction inherent in what otherwise might be two opposing concepts.
