Through a special arrangement, what follows is a summary of an article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research's weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.
The Demandware's XChange Conference in Las Vegas showed that, while the convergence of content and commerce is happening fast, the convergence of e-commerce and point of sale is far from ready for prime time.
Retailers appear to be waiting to see what vendors will do before they make a lot of commitments to a strategy of convergence.
I think convergence will happen, though. We've seen in our store and e-commerce studies that retailers were uncertain as to whether e-com as a platform could step up and take on all commerce anywhere, but the last couple of years has seen more certainty from our survey takers — as much as possible, they want commerce to be common no matter the channel, and they'll deal with the rest. That means price, item, customer, promotion (to some degree), loyalty, etc.
Source: Demandware video
It also means a real opportunity for Demandware, one of a handful of vendors out there that can legitimately claim both e-commerce and now also point of sale. In this case, customers are patient. They are holding on to their existing POS investments a little longer than they would like. They'd rather struggle along for now and wait until the future of this convergence is clear, than jump too early.
But, as we talked about in a panel session at the conference, that doesn't mean that retailers are holding still. There are a lot of "surround" strategies in play in retail right now, where e-commerce is being extended to surround POS as assisted selling or endless aisle, as clienteling or other employee-facing apps related to customers. It's also being extended as stand-alone mobile POS, which may someday grow up to be THE POS, across all channels.
The challenge here is that it really is as hard as it looks. The good news is that retailers, for all that they want it, don't seem to be rushing in.