Being the beginning of the year, a lot of time is spend within retailers determining what went well last year and what didn’t. Oh, and how do you fix it THIS year? These articles show where retailers ran into challenges and where they are planning on focusing their efforts and dollars in 2015.
Tech Spending: The Any-Channel Revolution Takes Shape – The very first section regarding retail technology satisfaction shows that retailers are becoming less satisfied with their retail investments (rate falling from 70% to 63%) mostly due to the inability for cross-channel support. It was for this exact reason that we released our Multichannel Buyer’s Guide that helps retailers understand what capabilities they need to be successful in multichannel and how to select retail technology to support them. One of the most common questions we get is “Which ERP/POS/eCommerce system would you recommend to support my multichannel efforts?” Apparently, this is because the systems they currently have aren’t cutting it.
Top Retail Trends for 2015 – A retail expert from ERP vendor, NetSuite, gives his opinion on what he thinks retailers will be thinking about in 2015. He touches on cloud technology, personalization, multichannel and mobile. These were also the hot topics at the National Retail Federation conference and Outdoor Retailer Winter Market in January.
Ecommerce: Blurring the lines between online and offline experiences – This article provides some nice research that supports the notion that no matter where the order is placed or where it is fulfilled, the experience is more important than the channel. The most interesting point they made, however, was that there was no correlation to a company’s success and and their transaction model combination (i.e. buy-online-pickup-in-store vs. buy online and ship). That tell me retailers need to be prepared to handle them all!
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