Cloud Series: Cloud for Retail

Cloud has and will continue transforming the retail industry. No surprises here. Customers have changed the way they interact with?businesses,?thus becoming the main influences on how merchants provide their products. Consumer shopping behaviors and habits have changed over the better part of 2 years. You know this and are a part of this consumer behavioral change. During the pandemic, we shifted towards ordering our groceries, our clothes, and other products online. We looked over our brand loyalties and considered trying new brands.?We preferred and needed contactless delivery/pick-up and if the business was not offering this solution,?we quickly scrolled past their name on the app.?The retail industry quickly needed to adapt to these changing consumer spending habits and the cloud enables retailers to make swift?pivots to better cater for their customers’ needs. ?

Inventory Management?

Cloud platforms such as AWS and Microsoft Azure provide many implementations for the retail industry from an inventory management aspect. Have you ever searched for a product on an app and the product’s location is specified by aisle and count? Thank cloud for that.?Features, such as real-time store inventory, is important to inform and engage the customer. It's imperative for the business to have this data ready, accurate, and updated in real-time for both the consumer and employee. Cloud platforms?provide these capabilities by connecting the POS to inventory. This results in?reducing the possibility of providing misinformation to the consumer and employees becoming a single source of truth versus the old ways of manually synchronizing inventories.

Moreover, automating the repurchasing process allows inventories to be constantly replenished. In those micro shopping moments, having an item in stock or otherwise can ultimately lead to a gain or loss of the customer’s loyalty. Cloud computing empowers a business’s ability to effectively forecast inventory and demand. It is this real-time data availability with just a few clicks that helps speed up a business's time-to-market to continue delivering value to their customer. ?

Pricing and Data Analytics?

For consumers, the price of an item plays a large part in their purchasing decisions. Prices can drive potential consumers to other competitors if not at the proper level. In traditional ways of pricing analysis, the processes were manual and data?gaps would?result from having multiple sources of information. Finding insights, then, would be cumbersome resulting in prolonged decision-making timelines. Companies would face lost opportunities to gain competitive advantages over their competitors. With the cloud, however, pricing analysis is more accurate and reliable. With one trusted source of data readily accessed by departments and with the use of automation tools,?predictive pricing models are generated, and insights are gained from machine learning to make faster decisions.

Reducing informational silos and automating these analytical processes can reduce costs and drive human efforts elsewhere. Retail industry leaders who have adopted these cloud capabilities can gain competitive advantages by having a deeper understanding of their customers’ spending habits – using pricing and product data to improve their marketing and promotional strategies. These AI and machine learning tools should be leveraged as variables such as current season, trends, and promotions can be inputted to provide pricing models that lead to opportunities for growth.

Outlook on Retail Cloud Adoption?

According to Mordor Intelligence, North America leads the demand for retail cloud solutions with an expected growth rate of 16.3% over the next 5 years.?Specifically, Software as a Service (SaaS) playing the main factor for growth as retailers look to enhance their customer experience. Retailers looking to take on the transformation to cloud should outline their business goals and determine which cloud capabilities will allow them to accomplish their objectives. They should look at pressing business needs and align them with the cloud technologies that will ultimately drive growth, provide value to customers, and allow for the flexibility to scale.