You’re standing in a long line at the grocery store with a can of cranberry sauce, a gallon of vanilla ice cream and a pumpkin pie in your basket. You’re there on busiest grocery shopping day of the year, the day before Thanksgiving, and even though you are in the express lane, it’s moving slowly. The result is likely to be a long wait and a poor checkout experience.
Over the last decade, mobile POS solutions have evolved from being a cost-effective, simple-to-implement solution for the SMB segment to a key component in enhancing the customer experience in enterprise retail environments. According to Juniper Research, the adoption of these solutions will drive annual mobile POS transactions from 28 billion in 2018 to over 87 billion by 2023.
Anyone can buy what you sell, but how do you know they’ll come back to buy from you again? And what is it that brings them back? These are important questions in understanding why your customers buy from you and not your competitors. An important factor that retailers should consider while organizing their sales strategy is how their products, services and everyday interactions make customers feel. Emotion is a major driver for purchases, and an even bigger driver when it comes to loyalty.
One cannot deny the convenience eCommerce provides us today, especially for retail shopping. We can sit on our couch, order whatever we need and it is delivered right to our doorstep. Over the years, eCommerce has seen immense growth. According to a recent TechCrunch article, Amazon’s Prime Day sales in 2019 are expected to push U.S. eCommerce sales to $2 billion. Another article in Internet Retailer mentioned that eCommerce represented 14.3 percent of retail sales in 2018.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be transformative for every aspect of a retailer’s business. With AI, retailers can automate the supply chain, utilize data to drive sales and hyper-personalize the customer experience. While AI sounds futuristic, it’s closer than you might think. Juniper Research predicts retailers will spend $7.3 billion on AI by 2022, compared with the approximately $2 billion spent in 2018.
