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.
Beyond all the glittering new technologies on display, the NRF Big Show had a consistent theme to it, and that is that the mass merchandising days of "stack 'em high and watch 'em fly!" are over. There is no longer any argument or real resistance to the reality that consumers are in control of the retail interaction and they routinely use information delivered via consumer-mobile devices to investigate, select, and purchase products to fit their lifestyle needs.
For consumers, the whole world is a store, prices are ubiquitous, and assortments are virtually endless. The challenge for retailers now is that consumers expect services such as buy anywhere/fulfill anywhere, "endless aisle," click and collect, etc. to work. And while many retailers have done what they needed to in the short term with their legacy technologies to make those services available to consumers, they haven't yet figured out how to perform them efficiently and are probably losing profits as a result.
So it's "game on!" for retailers — the starting whistle has blown and it's time to execute within the new customer-centric paradigm. At the NRF show, technology providers such as IBM, SAP, JDA and others showed solutions that focus on optimized and dynamic supply chains that can calculate the optimal fulfillment location for any consumer order, no matter where it was generated.
This year's show also demonstrated that bringing the store into the digital world remains a top to-do for retailers.
One of the biggest problems that the Internet of Things (IoT) — this year's shiny object trend — may address is that while retailers can, and do, track consumers' paths-to-purchase in the digital space, shoppers are invisible to retailers in the store until they get to the checkout counter. The challenge of integrating store selling systems with e-commerce remains, and solutions that addressed the challenge from Toshiba, SAP, Oracle and others were prominently displayed.
Retailers understand that it isn't enough to merely react better to consumer demand coming from new places. They must predict that demand more accurately and plan their assortments and allocations accordingly. The good news is that there are many new signals coming from consumers that help retailers predict demand — from social media, online search, product affinity analyses, etc. Many of these new signals are what constitutes "big data" and at NRF customer data analysis and planning systems were demoed to interested retailers.
In the end, of course, retailers only make money when consumers pay for goods and services. The Future of Payments was also a big topic at NRF 2015. The U.S. faces a 2015 deadline for EMV (or "chip and pin") compliance, but tokenized and mobile payment systems like those offered by PayPal and Apple were also hot topics.