3 Important Innovations Transforming Retail In 2018

Over the past few years, a significant shift in technology has been seen to enhance user experience and offer an improved overall customer value proposition. With the profound transformative changes, you may experience growing pains but it also leads to incredible opportunities, if following the right roadmap.

Like any other industries, retail is nowhere behind from being disruptive. The transformation has propelled by several factors including high consumerism, favorable demographics, and easy credit availability. Thus, with increasing demands, the retailers need to grow, evolve and refine their business strategies which improve customer retention rates.

Nowadays, it is not enough to simply stock with alluring products and wait for users to step to your door. Continuous digital revolutions are changing the way people shop. Rather than just depending on traditional e-commerce stores, retailers are making their products accessible online through websites and mobile applications.

The key drivers that are altering retailers into tech companies are:

  • Increasing number of social media users
  • Growing smartphone usage thus increases m-commerce
  • Paired with powerful analytics tools, the rapid development of digital infrastructure and smart money transfer options lead to omnichannel retailers

Along with all these, the first and foremost reason to step into digitization is that it enables shoppers to reach their goals as effective and easy as possible.

Here are three important technology innovations that help retailers to witness a significant growth in their business.

  1. AI has Become Inevitable Choice in E-commerce

“Artificial Intelligence is the holy grail, it’s the big dream that anybody who’s ever been in computer science has been thinking about.” Bill Gates

Artificial Intelligence Solutions is poised to revolutionize the entire retail industry. It plays a game-changing role by creating a more personalized shopping experience for consumers. Wondering how you use AI to create a personalized space.

  • Score Deals with Accuracy with AI and CRM

Machine learning is an important part of AI which enables you to make a quick analysis of copious amounts of customer details. Instead of painstakingly working on massive data sets without a clue, an advanced CRM solution with AI helps you in nurturing relationships that add value to your business. AI offers the ability to simplify your organization’s data thus sales reps can easily match their revenue goals.

  • Add Cohesiveness from IoT Innovations

IoT offers connectivity for all facets of daily life. Keeping a track on all the items coming in or leaving the warehouse can be a hassle. IoT sensors are used to manage the inventory in real time, saving time and human efforts for making the flow streamlined.

  • Provide Better Services at Lower Cost with Chatbots

Create personalized marketing opportunities by using AI to eradicate redundancies. Chatbots are a notable example that helps retailers to cut on customer service costs by answering up to 80% of viable questions, speeding up response times, enabling to have a smooth voice conversation without agents and much more. It will have a direct impact on productivity metrics such as increased loyalty and customer satisfaction.

  • Seamless Customer Experiences with Image Recognition

By utilizing the power of artificial intelligence with natural language processing potential, e-commerce platforms will increase their customer engagement rates by delivering an amazing shopping experience. You just need to click a picture, visual search reads the image and describes every minute detail about it including color, size, shapes, proportions, and even product names and brands. Image Recognition is worth than a thousand keywords!

  1. The Inception of AR Lead to a Potential Shift in Consumer Demand

“Augmented Reality allows for convenience and eliminates the mess of testing physical products in the store. Isn’t that amazing!”

Regardless of the location, augmented reality app developers ensure that your customers get comprehensive information about their products which helps them to make the right purchasing decisions, instantly. AR purpose various features that strengthen your e-commerce platform.

  • Get the Widest Assortment of Products to Make a Choice

Employing AR capabilities helps your customers to look at all the product variations including color and style differences. It makes them more confident about their purchase.

  • Not Just Looks, Explore Its Features

It is noted that customers are even ready to pay more if they can get a preview by AR. Along with its looks, AR provides extra information, animations, and visualizations from a different angle so that they can make their interactions count. It could reduce the number of abandoned carts by broadening the horizons of the customers.

  • Sell Your Products Globally, with Ease

According to Think Mobiles, an average time spent on a site was 2 minutes 31 seconds but with AR it has increased to 5 minutes 31 seconds. It gives you an opportunity to carter masses across the globe without the need of actual stores.

  1. Garner Brand Loyalty Throughout Product Lifecycle with Blockchain

Do you know, the act of paying is often treated as something that is detached from the experience? Not anymore!

Although there is no lack of e-commerce e-stores, however e-commerce solutions with blockchain technology are more advantageous as they are uniquely suited to resolve problems faced by e-retailers. Let’s look at how it proves beneficial when applied in real applications.

  • Security, The Top Most Priority

Since one data breach can cost an e-retailer loos of future market share and millions in revenue. By embedding distributed ledger technology, you can get the highest level of security to protect your online database.

  • Secure and Low-Cost Payments

Blockchain e-commerce projects like Request Network and ECoinmerce aim at fast and secure transactions which improve e-commerce model. With this, you can provide low-cost financial transactions with high-security standards to your customers while shopping online.

As retailers it’s high time to focus on customer experience, technology is set to make you a thought leader in innovation which will bring a stark difference in the near future.