How retail should deal with the looming uncertainty

1. How Retail Should Deal with the Looming Uncertainty

2. Introduction Long before a novel virus disrupted our everyday lives and, in a way, forced us to adapt to a new way of living, there were talks about the ‘Retail apocalypse’. Over the past couple of years, store closures have happened faster than store openings, while the overall foot traffic in malls and physical shops continues to decrease. However, this decrease in the customers visiting the brick-and-mortar stores has corresponded with an increase in online sales. If we look at the numbers, the overall sales have amplified despite the store closures. With the COVID-19 outbreak, the closing speed has accelerated & the foot traffic has nosedived. But, this means that the ‘digital retail ecosystem in making’ will simply come to its conclusion much earlier than it was expected to. Omni-channel will no longer be an option, digital transformation will be inevitable. As people are wary of touching things or even coming in close contact with others, it is necessary that retailers step up their game according to the changing consumer behaviour. As per a recent report, 58% of the people are likely to avoid public areas such as shopping malls amid the worsening outbreak. Estimates of sales volume through online grocery delivery in Beijing were reported to be two to three times as high as before the outbreak.

3. Gartner research has shown that more than 80% of retailers have or plan to implement AI solutions across 5 key merchandising processes by 2021: product development and selection; planning; buying; demand forecasting; and allocation and replenishment to better deal with situations like the COVID-19 pandemic better. The analyst predicts that Retailers that do not renew their focus on utilizing their store portfolio and on providing compelling unified retail commerce consumer-facing experiences will continue to lose out. They also need to develop realistic and benefit-adding use cases for AI and ML into their business operations for core supply chain planning, forecasting, inventory and merchandising functions. We are presenting some retail software solutions that the industry should adopt to come out strong from this crisis and develop greater trust among the customers. These solutions focus on how retailers can eliminate or minimize the need for human-to-human contact for ending the scepticism in their buyers.

4. Building an end-to-end contactless retail ecosystem • RFID-integrated retail inventory management systems • By integrating the in-store products with RFID tags, the retailers can build a truly connected inventory, which would not require any physical contact. RFID-tagged products can offer real-time insights about consumer behavior, helping the retailers understand the demand levels of a product so that they can stock up the inventory accordingly. At the same time, this would also enable the retailers to eliminate such products that are least on the popularity scale among the buyers. • Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning solutions can play a crucial role here. If a consumer visits a store and would like to check out a product’s ingredients or expiry date, they can do so by simply scanning it through an intelligent application on their phones that detects the product through the RFID tag and consequently pulls up all the relevant information that the user may like to know. • At the checkout counters, the cashier can simply scan the products with a fixed or hand-held RFID scanner/reader to bill the customer with the right price. This way, no real touch happens between the customers and the store staff, thus, making the entire buying process comparatively risk-free. • Read Full Blog at: https://www.cigniti.com/blog/supply-chain-slowdown-covid-technology/