More than 6400 retail stores have shut down in 2017 and approximately 3600 more are expected to shut down. That’s bad news, evidently. But, that’s not the end of the world for brick & mortar.
By 2025, physical retail stores will require a pretty strong reason to exist. But they will exist. According to Gartner, by 2020 customer will manage 85% of their relationships with enterprises without interacting with a single human.
How will the retail stores of future look like and what will be new trends in retail software solutions?
“Today, retailers cannot compete on product selection and price alone. They must compete on the in-store experience.”
— Alexei Agratchev, RetailNext co-founder and CEO.
Conclusion
These aren’t just hypothetical scenarios created out of thin air. Recent advancements in technology, retail software solutions, analytics, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, and Big data has helped predict the future of retail industry and it does not look anything less than bright!
By 2025, physical retail stores will require a pretty strong reason to exist. But they will exist. According to Gartner, by 2020 customer will manage 85% of their relationships with enterprises without interacting with a single human.
How will the retail stores of future look like and what will be new trends in retail software solutions?
“Today, retailers cannot compete on product selection and price alone. They must compete on the in-store experience.”
— Alexei Agratchev, RetailNext co-founder and CEO.
- People might quickly summon a human-sized personal assistant on their mobile devices with the help of Augmented Reality. It will almost be like a personal assistant guiding them through the aisles across the stores.
- Stores will be smaller and smaller. Retail stores will focus more on creating an enhanced shopping experience for the customer rather than simply focusing on products.
- The technical gap between traditional retail stores and online stores will be bridged. The intelligence level of online stores and traditional stores will be the same. Imagine your ‘browsing history’ being stored in real-world. Retailers will have knowledge of who is in the store, where they move in the space, and all the products they interact with will be recorded.
- As we talk about this, neurobiologists in Germany are developing a technique where they can map the shopper’s brain waves to gain insights into how a human brain reacts and perceives pricing. What exactly happens or what does the customer think when they look at the price tag.
- Online commerce and offline commerce has now merged into the same thing. The concept of “digital storefronts” will be a common sight on the streets. These digital displays allows customers to order items for same-day delivery. These stores will not require any staff or even inventory for that sake.
- Social media integration in stores is something already happening. Similar to buying online, stores will display items that are prominent online and trending
- on websites like Pinterest, Instagram and more. Store items will wear a tag of social media logos which are among the top favourites on social media.
- It is predicted that, by 2020 offline stores will have access to all of the same key data and analytics as eCommerce retailers. The analytics and tests being performed online today, the same will be done for physical brick & mortar stores.
- Retail stores will adopt dynamic pricing models. Prices of in-store items will change on hourly basis. With analogous retail software solutions in the future, in-store items will be able to compete directly with websites like Amazon.
Conclusion
These aren’t just hypothetical scenarios created out of thin air. Recent advancements in technology, retail software solutions, analytics, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, and Big data has helped predict the future of retail industry and it does not look anything less than bright!