Shopping has always been seriously big business – with total global retail sales reaching more than $30 trillion in 2021. Conducting business in 2021 required integrating necessary changes to business models and creating a new norm for both the company and its customers.
These new retail trends include but are not limited to:
Social distancing:
Retailers practiced social distancing by either closing brick-and-mortar locations indefinitely or reducing the business’s capacity by up to 75%.
Location independence:
In most office settings, it takes the rollout of teleconferencing solutions to work remotely. In the retail world, location independence looked more like eCommerce.
Need for Speed:
For the sake of being prepared should anything like COVID-19 ever happen again, companies had to learn how to implement critical decisions more quickly.
The ability for customers to simply walk out of the store with their items being scanned automatically and the total debited from their account will likely soon become widespread. Amazon originally pioneered this approach through the Just Walk Out system, put into practice through Amazon Go stores.
AR promises to radically change the in-store experience as well. In fashion retail, smart mirrors bring unimaginable sensitivity. Users do not even need clothes to try out a new wardrobe that allows them to superposition items and clothes using virtual changing rooms and to collect friends' comments by sharing images on social media.
Identifying customers at the time of sale - using loyalty cards for example - is no longer enough for retailers. They want to know who the people in the store are before they buy, so they can provide a personalized shopping experience. However, most stores do not have the luxury of recognizing every face that comes through the door.
The AI retail experience is automated and customized with the goal of making shopping easier for the customer. For example, Amazon Go, a fully automated grocery store in Seattle, avoids checkout lines and cashiers.
Since the advent of Apple's Siri, voice assistant technology has exploded in popularity and is now being phased out of smartphones and into other devices. One survey shows that 60 million people now have at least one smart speaker system at home.
Learning analytics is important to understand your customer. Information such as demographics and customer traffic allows businesses to make better decisions based on customer details and personalize the customer experience.
