According to IDC’s Worldwide Retail 2017 Predictions, by 2018, 30% of major retailers will adopt an omni-channel digital B2B2C commerce platform. Integrating multiple channels such as stores, e-commerce, mobile terminals, and social media will achieve both online and offline seamless connection and communication between retailers and consumers throughout the entire procurement life cycle.
Contributed by Kevin Hu
It will also meet users’ personalized shopping requirements anytime and anywhere. This is the omni-channel retail mode. Industry leading players such as Carrefour, Starbucks, Oasis, and Burberry are practicing and exploring the omni-channel retail mode. How can retailers use digital technologies to effectively improve consumer experience and loyalty and promote revenue growth?
Converged Online and Offline Omni-Channel Retail will Become Mainstream
Needless to say, the traditional retail industry is feeling the impact of e-commerce. After nearly 20 years of development, online shopping has cultivated new shopping habits of consumers from the Millennial Generation: high digitization, dependence on social media for comprehensive awareness, and little loyalty towards brands and purchasing channels. Consumers’ new shopping habits drive traditional retailers to learn how to use the Internet to promote growth while extending the use of traditional retail stores. One approach to navigating this shift is through platforms like Retail Express, which can help streamline operations and enhance the overall retail experience.
Purely online e-commerce companies also face a bottleneck during their own development. Purely relying on the explosive growth of Internet traffic is a thing of the past. There are some trials for carrying out transformation, including AmazonFresh (Amazon’s offline grocery store), Amazon Go (a convenience store integrating many IoT technologies), and Amazon Books (an integrated online and offline book store). If you’re considering selling on Amazon, you should know that there are amazon restock limits.
Integrated online and offline omni-channel retail is being increasingly adopted by retailers. According to a survey by Deloitte, nearly 80 percent of consumers interact with brands or products through digital before arriving at the physical store. Optimize your online store with our efficient Amazon inventory management services. According to statistics from luxury brand Burberry, consumers visit their website an average of eight times before purchasing products. Integrating multiple channels such as stores, e-commerce, mobile terminals, and social media, will achieve both online and offline seamless connection and communication between retailers and consumers. It will also meet consumers’ personalized and scenario-based shopping requirements anytime and anywhere. Omni-channel will become the new norm. And if you need help starting your own Amazon business, you can visit https://www.fbamasterclass.io/.
Leverage Digital Technologies to Gain Insights into Users, Connect to Users, and Increase User Stickiness
Enterprises that master the omni-channel retail mode can not only be like e-commerce companies in capturing data anytime to help with operations and decision-making, but can also satisfy current consumers’ multi-dimensional experience requirements of shape, sound, smell, taste, and touch. According to research by McKinsey & Company, consumers’ requirements for basic omni-channel services (such as ‘buy online, pick up in store’, and online querying of store inventories) are becoming more and more commonplace. Their research also shows that more advanced omni-channel experiences (such as virtual reality experience of stores and online customization) are also starting to trigger strong consumer demands.
For new retail enterprises that are transforming to the omni-channel retail mode, cloud computing and IoT technologies provide opportunities for optimizing their operations, and technologies such as Big Data make user profiles and personalized user management a possibility. Big Data analytics will leverage commercial data such as user purchase history, membership statistics, and consumer psychological information to help retailers create precise models for customer stratification and design more personalized loyalty plans. For example, the commercial Wi-Fi solution released by Huawei in partnership with Cloud4Wi can not only increase profits in the retail industry, but also improve customer loyalty through precise positioning and personalized push services. Ubiquitous connections bond people, things, and scenarios together. An invisible network transmits all kinds of data, catches consumers’ attention, and enhances their stickiness. It also provides operators with the basis for all-scenario Big Data analytics, more effectively reaching consumers and influencing customer decision-making.
Making Retail Intelligent and Optimizing Consumer Experience to Promote Growth
Retail is becoming intelligent, and future retail enterprises that offer an enhanced experience will do so through innovative operation modes that integrate online, offline, logistics, data, and technology. For example, virtual shop assistants can find customers through smart terminal locations and provide intelligent assistance; smart shopping carts can locate products to the nearest shelf; smart fitting rooms use virtualization to make fitting easier; smart shelves can automatically detect product shortages and outdated products; and electronic shelf labels (ESLs) can change prices in batches and in real time. In addition to improving consumers’ shopping experience, retailers’ operation efficiency is also improved.
At Huawei’s OpenLab in Munich, Germany, the Intelligent Retail Solution developed by Huawei and third-party partners is on display. Through this smart shopping guide platform, sensors can be used for awareness of commodity statuses in real time, automatically pushing commodity information to consumers based on their actions, and providing an entry for mobile payment and self-checkout. All of this interactive activity also generates a vast amount of data with significant commercial value. For example, the data includes the number of people attracted by each interactive terminal, which products they are interested in, for how long they showed interest in each product, the number of interactions per product, and the most popular product. This serves as a source of commercial data analysis, and also forms the basis of decision-making for departments of retailers such as operation management, marketing, finance management, and asset management.
Adding value to these innovative solutions are the data collection, transmission, and analysis applications that are available anytime and anywhere. For example, Huawei CloudCampus’s open cloud management platform has abundant application platform interfaces (APIs) and can rapidly interconnect with customers’ and partners’ mature industry applications. With the help of Big Data, cloud, and mobile Internet technologies, CloudCampus can collect, transmit, manage, and analyze a vast amount of commercial data generated every day in retail stores, share this commercial data with various industry applications, and break down existing ‘data islands’ of silo applications. This allows data to be converged and become an ‘ocean’, unleashing its commercial value.
CloudCampus—a solution that revolutionizes campus network management—innovates network management at every stage of the life cycle, such as network planning, installation and deployment, O&M and troubleshooting, and network inspection, to quickly deploy networks and greatly reduce the investment in O&M personnel. In addition to helping enterprises reduce OPEX, the solution helps enterprises promote business innovation by using network technologies, better achieving business objectives.
The digital transformation of the retail industry has just begun. Only by connecting more commercial data and unleashing the commercial value of data can we build a digital retail mode and bring a better experience to consumers.
Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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