As the use of technology permeates society as we know it, one niche that is seeing additional technological investments would be retail businesses. And it makes sense when you think about it, considering how retail shops located in shopping havens like Singapore tend to be highly competitive niches with high operational costs in terms of both rental and manpower.
In this context, every additional edge that retailers can add to their business will certainly help, be it improving customer experience to help steer purchasing decisions, or being able to analyse the traffic through their outlets.
Below are some capabilities that a cutting-edge retail store may have:
- Points of Sales (POS): While it is rare to find a shop that does not come with a POS terminal these days, the sophistication levels of the equipment vary widely. The most advanced implementations could see inventory data being transmitted back to the headquarters in real time, allowing the business to forecast trends such as the sales of an outlet or the popularity of specific products. Some stores have also switched to mobile POS (mPOS) barely larger than a smartphone, allowing them to free up the counter space required previously to display more merchandise instead.
- Guest Wi-Fi: While offering Wi-Fi may seem pointless in the age of ubiquitous smartphones and data plans, free internet can have an impact at locations popular with tourists. Due to the cost of data roaming, free internet access could draw more tourists to a store, or influence those who are already there to browse a little longer while waiting for friends (or a WhatsApp message from them) to arrive. The cost to the outlet? Could be almost none for a shop that is already wired up.
- Multimedia displays: The human eye is attracted to movement, which is what video displays deliver. While posters and banners work fine for simpler messages (such as “Sale!”), videos are tireless round-the-clock presenters, and when used with audio, allows for more subtle or complex sales messages. And retailers can update the videos remotely, or even switch them based on the real-time stock level of a particular outlet.
- Security cameras: Relatively cheap to install and operate, security cameras can give business owners greater peace of mind, as well as offer evidence in the event of crime or disputes taking place in the outlet. They also make it easier to gauge whether the existing staff strength is adequate to deal with the number of shoppers, and to redeploy staff to busier outlets as necessary.
- Positioning technologies: Larger retailers can take advantage of positioning technologies that track the movement of shoppers in an outlet using their smartphones. This allows them to establish a rich range of metrics such as footfall, peak timings, whether a shopper is a new one, how long shoppers stay in a shop, and even the route they take through the various departments.
Of course, undergirding all of the above technologies would be network connectivity required to deliver all the capabilities. While this can be complex and costly if implemented in a piecemeal fashion, a new paradigm called Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is making things an order of magnitude easier, offering business-grade reliability across a single data pipe without compromising individual services.
