Smart Retail

Brick-and-mortar retailers are starting to use IoT technology and analytics to improve operations, increase sales, reduce costs, manage stock, and enhance the customer experience. E-commerce has an advantage over the classic retail because it operates with lower costs and knows many things about the customers. The use of technology is not solving all challenges for retailers, but it helps to close the gap and enables new store concepts. Small autonomous stores or smart coolers and racks are a key component to enable new store locations and 24x7 capabilities.

Let’s take a look at some concepts and how they can be leveraged  

New store concepts allow retailers to extend opening hours without high costs, to enhance shopping experience and close the gap to online retail

There are multiple concepts. There are no bad or good ones as all of them have advantages and disadvantages. There are different technologies which can be used to realize new shopping concepts and depending on the goods and other parameters you need to select the one which fits your and your customer’s needs best. The list below shows the autonomous and semi-autonomous store concepts and provides a short overview about the advantage and disadvantages.

We will talk about different options in the next blog.