Modern technology assists retailers in improving every facet of their customer service. This holds true for both big and small businesses. These innovations could directly affect customers or boost the effectiveness of retail staff. Most importantly, companies who create original and creative solutions to issues can stand out from the competition and make more money. Here we will be sharing innovative technologies and tools for e-commerce growth.
Demand Forecasting Using AI
Some of the most well-known brands in the world employ this potent instrument. Demand forecasting assists companies in gaining the trust of their clients. They can supply effectively as a result, preparing for market developments. In emergency and disaster situations, this is extremely crucial. Supplies may be scarce during emergencies. Stores that can adapt and acquire in-demand products can prosper as products fly off the shelves. Additionally, this technology can enhance marketing, logistics, production, and customer and supplier relationship management as well as inventory planning. Demand forecasting promotes more environmentally friendly consumption and manufacturing. Items can be produced and ordered by the quantity required by the consumer when demand is predicted with a great deal greater accuracy.
A lot more adaptable and flexible than their conventional counterparts, AI-based demand forecasting methods are available. Companies can better track changes in client demand since machine learning can be implemented much more quickly. Your company must now more than ever be seriously interested in information on consumer spending trends due to the constantly changing client behaviors. To be competitive in the market, companies need to use technologies that analyze this data to produce insightful findings.
Automation and Robots in Retail
Robotic hardware has a close relationship with artificial intelligence. Applications for this are numerous, including delivery, inventory control, and customer support.
Delivery
Autonomous vehicles have improved along with advances in artificial intelligence. Businesses are investigating the use of drones for retail delivery.
Robots For Customer Service
Robotic customer service is a topic of investigation for retail businesses. Customers can be greeted by the robot, who can also assist them in selecting the best good or service for their needs. Additionally, the robot employs AI and facial recognition to determine whether a client is wearing a mask and provides relevant advice.
Bot-Based Inventory Management
In some cases, special hardware can help with inventory management where ceiling-mounted cameras and shelf-mounted cameras cannot. Machines can automate the process of locating misplaced merchandise on shelves and sales floor numbers. They can also notify staff when stock levels of particular items are getting low.
Bringing Online and Offline Shopping Experiences Closer Together
Many storefronts now provide buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS), same-day delivery, and online shipping options in addition to selling goods in brick-and-mortar locations. Businesses need to install point-of-sale systems in a more sophisticated way because there are so many new ways to order items.
- How does the database entry for the store’s sales floor quantity change when a customer places an online order for a product?
- Does the number of items on the sales floor decrease if a product is held for a pickup order?
A current system has to be able to respond to these queries. Having processes in place to manage both in-store and online purchases is not the key to this. An integrated system that is connected and unified and works with other technologies will be necessary for this. Some of the biggest challenges that software engineers are trying to solve while developing the next generation of systems for retail enterprises include integrating online and offline transactions, inventory, and promotions across all physical locations and online storefronts.
Payment is a crucial step in bridging the gap between offline and online purchases. The convenience and uniformity of accepting several digital payment options improve the consumer experience. Better accessibility for both online and offline shoppers can be achieved through the acceptance of purchase now, pay later, QR code payments, and virtual payments such as Google Pay, PhonePe, Amazon Pay, and Paytm. This is why innovation in fintech and the retail industry are closely intertwined. The easier it is for a retail company to organize the efficient running of online and offline stores regarding the financial aspect, the more economical and effective the solutions supplied by fintech businesses are.
Indoor Positioning Simplifies Store Navigation
Since a few years ago, indoor positioning systems (IPS) have gained popularity as a way for users to navigate inside spaces where GPS is not feasible. But this technology has far more uses than are initially apparent.
Indoor navigation appears to have a lot of possibilities for user navigation. This is starting to become apparent in stores, offices, airports, and healthcare facilities.
IPS Systems in Stores Implementation
Your company may find it difficult to implement in-store navigation options. Equipment is the first step. To succeed, the proper infrastructure must be put in place. Beyond only assisting visitors with their shopping, IPS systems offer a lot more possibilities. The ability to watch client traffic, make targeted suggestions, and track individual items are three advantages of knowing where customers purchase in the store.
Targeted Offers
Using the company’s official app, customers can track their location and receive personalized product and bargain recommendations on their cell phones when they enter a specific area of the store. This may boost conversion rates while customers shop.
Customer traffic information
In a deeper sense, information regarding customer behavior in the business helps to better arrange products on shelves. It also aids in addressing the following questions:
- When visitors enter the store, where do they go?
- Are there any certain areas of the store that they tend to favor more than others?
- Do customers generally steer clear of certain areas of the store?
IPS tracking can provide answers to each of these queries. Of course, anonymized data is essential to safeguard user privacy, but these analytics may be crucial in assisting business owners in deciding where to position particular products. This information may be a useful negotiation tool when determining the price that vendors should pay to have their goods displayed in a section of the store that receives a lot of high traffic.
Item Tracking
Although beneficial, short-range RFID technology is employed to locate merchandise in stores. IPS can provide increasingly specific information on the locations of products on the sales floor as these technologies advance. This can not only enhance asset security efforts but also make it simpler to relocate relocated goods to their original places.
IoT devices are getting smaller and less expensive with time, but for now, implementing IoT technology may only be possible for a select few high-value items. This technology can be used to track office supplies like laptops and portable PCs by property managers.
Retail employees can utilize their work devices with IPS maps to find the item’s position in the store for duties like order fulfillment. They could navigate to the item in place if it has IPS tracking enabled. This would be helpful if something had unintentionally been moved from where it belonged.
Augmented reality transforms the customer and employee experience
Retail has long been a major application of augmented reality. No matter how one feels about the potential direction of augmented reality in the metaverse, it is undeniable that companies are giving their customers more immersive and consistent digital experiences. At the very least, this gives companies a tonne of chances to interact with customers in fresh, beneficial ways.
Virtual try-on options, augmented reality-enabled interior navigation, and other applications are a few ways to deliver these immersive experiences. One of the main technologies bridging the gap between online and brick-and-mortar stores is this one.
Try Before Purchase
The “try before purchase” applications are some of the most beneficial augmented reality (AR) solutions for digital customers in the retail sector. Virtual try-on technology is one of the best instances of this. Customers can view how they appear when putting on various things by employing AR technologies. They can also view images of various other things, such as furniture, similarly.
AR Navigation
Although indoor positioning was previously a trend we highlighted, it may improve the experiences of customers and employees much more when paired with AR. Shoppers can use indoor navigation powered by augmented reality technology to locate the goods they need inside a store by simply following instructions on their phone’s screen. If done properly, this may be incredibly engaging for customers and give more opportunities to show visitors customized ideas on-screen.
Retail employees can benefit from AR navigation as well. Order fulfillment staff can easily seek guidance on their screen to locate the aisle they’re looking for with the ability for these devices to utilize their cameras for augmented reality navigation.
Helping Retired Personnel With Other Task
Retail staff members can utilize augmented reality to see shelves before they are set up. AR-enabled corporate devices can show a 3D planogram on the sales floor utilizing a planogram as a base to act as a guide for the setup procedure. This may make it simpler for workers to place pegs, shelves, and fixtures where they belong.
Workers might use augmented reality to find issues with a shelf. A worker may place their device’s camera up on a shelf and use AI-based object detection technologies, which are used by manufacturing companies, to identify areas for improvement. The worker can see which areas of the shelf do not match the planogram by comparing the shelf with the relevant planogram displayed using AR rendering. Products that are misplaced, commodities that are zoned incorrectly, or even the identification of damaged goods could fall under this category.
Artificial Intelligence for Smart Store Automation
Artificial intelligence has in some way been involved in all of the previous trends. In the case of AR scene analysis, current AI is used. But in the retail sector, artificial intelligence can provide a lot more advantages. Artificial intelligence is used in consumer behavior analysis processes like demand forecasting, inventory management, and other types of analysis.
Self-Checkout In The Future
Self-checkout is more advanced than ever thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technology. Businesses can choose to highly automate consumer checkout procedures using advanced sensor arrays. Customers may now shop more conveniently as a result.
Deep learning, sensor fusion, and computer vision are all used in the project. Customers can be detected when they take an item off the shelf and put it in their cart thanks to the store’s extensive network of cameras and IoT sensors. The technology charges the customer’s credit card when they leave the store for the products they took.
This necessitates a thorough awareness of both the things the customer has added to their cart and their location inside the store. The system must be able to maintain track of how much of a certain item is on hand even if it is moved from its shelf.
Incorporating a sophisticated self-checkout system into your store may be challenging. Thankfully, self-checkout technology powered by AI is scalable. These devices could be used in vending machines. Customers might be able to access a particular refrigerator and take something out of it, for instance. Their card can be automatically charged by the device once they close the door. For smaller enterprises, this makes for a more seamless experience.
Powered By Ai Inventory Management
The retail sector will be driven by computers and huge databases in 2023. These systems’ complexity has, however, led to a number of faults and inefficiencies. Retail employees can discover that the system is displaying erroneous sales floor quantities for some SKUs. This also causes issues like inaccurate backroom location. To help businesses save time and money, these problems must be addressed.
We can manage these inventories more efficiently with artificial intelligence by using a variety of techniques. AI, for instance, may analyze customer buying patterns to forecast when particular goods might be more likely to move around the sales floor. This may force the system to prioritize manual auditing of some regions over others. While inspecting the entire business is a difficult undertaking, checking just the sections that require care is far more efficient.
If a more sophisticated network of cameras is not the answer, perhaps the task can be completed manually while still utilizing machine learning techniques. A retail employee might use their device to snap a photo of each area of a shelf rather than auditing each vacant space one at a time. Deep learning software may hasten the process of comparing the image to a planogram for object recognition. The system would then be able to identify which things were lacking. However, this approach necessitates careful zoning. Additionally, as objects may interfere with one another, this method might not be able to determine amounts.
Analyzing consumer behavior
In a prior post, we briefly discussed this topic by using indoor positioning systems to analyze in-store foot traffic. Analysis of consumer behavior has more applications than that, though. We can gauge their interest in what they are spending money on together with their demographics and spending habits using artificial intelligence. Having a better understanding of how to sell to their audiences can help firms.
Conclusion
As technology advances, several new markets and opportunities are waiting to be tapped. Businesses that can’t change to match fast-changing client demands, new technologies, and supply chains will continue to be disrupted by digital transformation and a data-driven culture. Retail businesses must therefore give customers a valuable, enticing, and accessible experience. Businesses that take the initiative to thoughtfully discuss their needs and ideas with retail software developers will be the pioneers in a future when consumers have more information available to them than ever.