Category: Retail / FMCG

3 Retail Technology Trends to keep an eye on in 2021

One of the best lessons that businesses learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is “evolve or die.” The retail industry is considered the most competitive and fastest-growing sector. Enterprises in this niche fight to the death to win customers' hearts. But the reality is that people are often fickle of heart and consumer behavior is constantly changing. Retailers are forced to manage their advertising budgets, handle complications of procurement, and oversee challenging manufacturing procedures. 

Today, retailers are trying to untangle things that can easily become a rat’s nest of logistics to get and keep products in the market. Technology, on the other hand, can lessen burdens from the shoulders of the retailers, freeing them to concentrate on what matters the most i.e., customer experience. When it comes to retail technological trends, five common things found are:  

• Optimization 
• Automation 
• Digital transformation
• Streamlined operations
• Less dependency on human labor

In 2021, technology companies are focusing more on developing creative and out-of-the-box solutions. According to RIS News , the retail IT expenditure has grown by 5.2% by mid-2020 and store IT spending by 5.4%. The COVID-19 pandemic has definitely impacted brick-and-mortar retailers, making customers prefer online shopping over physical stores. In order to stay profitable, a lot of retailers have shifted online or adopted some sort of technology into their business.

A recent survey on digital transformation in the retail industry shows that 89% of participants have already implemented or planned to integrate modern technology that will improve the customer experience, while another 94% say the same for technology to improve analytics.

Here are the top 3 Retail Technological Trends that are anticipated to revolutionize the industry in 2021.

With the plethora of data, it is only logical that this industry became more data-driven. Here’s how retail business owners can leverage predictive analysis in order to make smarter business decisions. They can analyze several factors:

• Customers' behavior and their journey analytics. It helps to customize the customer experience at all phases of their decision-making process.
• Purchase dynamics and inventory reporting. Using this, retailers can locate tendencies and enhance their replenishment strategy.
• Patterns in customer behavior. These might give interesting insights on how to boost sales, reduce cart renunciation and boost conversion rate.
• Customer preferences and interests. This is how retail business owners devise customer loyalty programs and special offers.;

2. Social Shopping:

With the rise in online purchases, more and more customers rely on the reviews and suggestions of other buyers. Social shopping all about including other shoppers in your purchases, making shopping a less personal experience. Social networking such as Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest along with fashion influencers and bloggers, have become a primary source of shopping inspiration and a place where trends grow and thrive. Shopping communities unite people who have similar interests. Group buying websites like Groupon encourages their customers to buy goods collectively for wholesale prices.

Recently, Gartner observed a sudden rise in the usage of augmented reality to 100 million customers by 2020. Last year, the consumer conversion rate for augmented reality engaged users increased by 90%. The potential of augmented reality in the retail sector in 2021 is hard to ignore. Virtual fitting rooms are the most intriguing technological advancement in the retail industry. As the “try-before-you-buy” method is lot more difficult while complying to public health mandates during the Coronavirus epidemic, AR is in a unique position to help shoppers make choices on products.

Though the Coronavirus epidemic is proven to an incredibly difficult for retail business owners, the latest technological advancements have bought a great deal of improvement and progress over the course of 2021. Modern technologies such as data science, machine learning, computer vision, virtual & augmented reality, and computer vision have shown that 2020’s challenges are opportunities for improvement. Has your retail business lost its pace due to the COVID-19 pandemic? KCS will help you in bringing your business back on track. They have a team of experienced tech-geeks who fulfills all their clients’ demand in no time.

>