Revolutionizing retail: Overview of the most innovative platforms for retailers at RTS

Xenoss MadTech digest is back with a new edition. We’ve created this biweekly newsletter to share our expertise in custom AdTech/MarTech software development and highlight the most prominent industry news.

Previously, we discussed retail media advertising and mobile SSPs in the post-identifier age. Check these editions out to be in the loop of the latest industry developments.

Retailers are spending a big coin on marketing: 9.1% of the total company revenue on average.? And many are also getting a proprietary slice of the AdTech supply chains.?

Walmart, Lowe’s, and BigBuy are among the growing cohort of retailers to launch a retail media network (RMN). And ad revenue from RMNs is projected to reach $52 billion in 2023 and $61 billion in 2024, the Association of National Advertisers reports.?

But beyond programmatic advertising, retailers have a host of other jobs to be done — from optimizing in-store engagement to creating consolidated customer identities (without breaching any privacy laws).?

To give you a taste of this booming tech marketplace, we prepared a list of the movers and shakers in the retail tech space, Xenoss got to meet during the last Retail Technology Show in London.?

Omnichannel customer engagement

Consumers continue to seek sleek, comforting, and curated shopping experiences. Forrester predicts that in 2023, belt-tightening shoppers will try to get the maximum value out of each brand (e.g., by getting pickier about keeping multiple groceries subscriptions).?

Brands, in turn, will have to learn how to provide more personalized and delightful sales & support on a smaller dime. That’s when omnichannel customer engagement platforms come in handy.?

• SleekFlow automates social selling, community marketing & customer support processes across platforms like Whatsapp, Messenger, and Instagram, among others (plus build no-code chatbots).?
• Proximity is a modular CX platform where you can cherry-pick features for customer data capture, personalized prospecting, appointment booking, and event management (plus sale on the spot with a mobile POS).?
• Yocuda is the engagement tool for omnichannel retailers looking for an easy way to identify online shoppers in-store with digital checks and re-engage them post-purchase (plus save the planet by ditching paper checks).?
• Slace allows you to engage offline customers using NFC technology. Place QR codes around your stores, then link those up to your messenger of choice to instantly identify and engage those warm prospects (while saving everyone data costs).?

Location intelligence?

Few consumers today have a fully “offline” shopping experience. Most browse deals on their phone while in-store, check product availability, and oftentimes — your competitors.?

Location intelligence platforms like Near help retailers make more sense of in-store shoppers’ habits by transforming (seeming) sporadic “wandering down the aisles” behaviours into a panoply of business insights about footfall trends, key trade areas, and store segmentation.?

Moreover, Near helps you match offline data with first-party customer insights to get a good view of customers’ brand affinity, known interests, and other online activity.??

Another strong contender is VisionR (former Glimpse), which relies on in-store sensors and computer vision technology called Scout?, to decode customers’ in-store behaviours. (Without breaching any privacy laws).?

With Scout?, you can explore more data on shelf spaces, basket details, in-store footfall, dwell times, category conversion rates, and more — all delivered via convenient online analytics dashboards.?

Scala, in turn, offers an in-store solution for shopper engagement empowered by sensor-based technology to analyze traffic, pathing, and dwell. Other in-store tools crafted by Scala include an assisted selling kiosk with video chat functionality to contact an expert and screens with QR codes to enable customers easily find products, reviews, and videos.???????????

Retail marketing?

The average number of customer touchpoints now counts in dozens (and sometimes — hundreds). So retail marketers need ‘mo tools to avoid having any loose (aka underoptimized) ends. If you’re looking for some upgrades to your stack, here’re our top picks:

• TruRating offers a unified solution for capturing customer feedback across in-store and digital channels and then transforming it into social proof and analytical insights.?
• Dartagnan is a drag-and-drop email builder with some pre-made, interactive building blocks and unbeatable deliverability rates (thanks to some optimized backend code). L’Oreal and Lacoste are big fans.?
• Sizer is a great add-on for conversion-obsessed apparel retailers. Embed an AI-powered sizing tool into your platform to minimize returns, exchanges, and conversion drop-offs.??

AI-driven e-commerce?

The e-commerce market will continue to do strong in 2023, growing at 8.9%, which is twice more than physical retail sales.?

Retailers who are contemplating the modernization of their e-commerce platforms should act now. Especially since SaaS solutions are getting better and better.?

Advanced Commerce, a SaaS merchandising platform, just launched GrapheneAI — a new algorithm purpose-built for fashion and apparel brands. The algorithm relies on AI-driven deep product tagging technology (aka grouping and analyzing different product attributes) to create personalized product suggestions, upsells, and cross-sell recommendations.?

Similar to Netflix, GrapheneAI progressively learns about the shoppers’ preferences to pitch-perfect outfit suggestions (which means a higher average order value, fewer returns, and better retention).?

And those operating e-commerce marketplaces should be paying attention to Mirakl — one of the best systems for running dropshipping operations. This Paris-based startup built our stellar infrastructure for managing multi-brand stores and B2B2C ops.?

So that you can effectively onboard new sellers to your marketplace and nurture win-win relationships with them. (FIY: Mirakle-powered e-commerce marketplaces generated 53% more sales during 2022 Cyber Week than regular e-commerce stores).?

Retail workforce management

Although online shopping has been all the rage, 43% of global consumers continue to shop in-store. But those offline shopping sprees aren’t always happy.?

PwC found that in the last 3 months, 59% of global shoppers were frustrated by frequent or occasional large queues in stores and/or busy locations. That’s no surprise given that 63% of retailers face frontline staff shortages as of 2023.?

With fewer hands and growing pressures for better CX, retailers are sizing up new tech investments for improving the front-of-store experience and increasing employee productivity.?

Some of the leaders in the space are:?

• StoreForce – a long-standing leader in specialty retail software, StoreForce is used by retailers in 60 countries to optimize workforce management and retention, improve KPI performance (e.g., sales targets), and achieve visibility into store performance.?
• StrongPoint designed a suite of competitive digital products for groceries. The Shopfloor solution reduces the pressure on floor staff with smart electronic shelf labels, automatic scales and wrapping systems, voice communication systems, and even a futuristic humanoid robot (if that’s your thing). Separately, the company has a set of back-office products for logistics, supply chain, and fulfilment management. If you want to scale home deliveries or even launch a micro-fulfilment centre, StrongPoint has the tech you need.?
• 42Gears provides retail businesses with mobile device management solutions that enable the secure management of corporate mobile devices used in retail operations, such as inventory management, customer service, and point-of-sale transactions. They also offer kiosk mode solutions to create interactive experiences for customers.

Identity management

With third-party cookies soon to be out of the picture, all the eyes are on first-party data. And retailers have plenty of valuable customer intel, but not necessarily in a readily accessible state.

Why? Because identity data collection and management is hard. Between costs and compliance, there are a lot of intricacies involved.?

Companies like Okta are helping retailers (and other industry players) make identity a core part of their business without focusing the core engineering efforts on its maintenance. It’s a SaaS converged identity and access management (IAM) platform with one of the best workflows or access administration, as well as market-leading SSO and analytics capabilities.?

Okta Customer Identity Cloud (powered by their recent acquisition of Auth0) helps retailers like Lush, Holland & Barrett, and Marks & Spencer, among others, maintain centralized customer identities across their digital product portfolio, plus deliver conversion-focused sign-up and sign-on experiences, plus keep all first-party data in one secure storage in an analytics-ready state.?

Speaking of which…?

Business intelligence and analytics

There’s no such thing as too much BI. The retail industry thrives on keeping count of their sales per floor square, average basket sizes, conversion rates, and more.?

The benefits of being data-driven are aplenty, according to S&P:?

So if you’re working in this direction, come check out:

• Kepler Analytics is a suite of retail analytics products some 500 mid-to-enterprise-size retailers use across 30,000 locations. You can switch between modular toolkits for merchandising (with a price response predictive module and some top-class stock levels optimization engineer), store network optimization (which provides passers-by traffic benchmarks), and in-store experience management (a sensor and analytics-driven in-store customer feedback loop solution).?
• Cortex Territory helps brands build up better bottom-up data flows by connecting frontline customer staff (and their knowledge) with central marketing teams via a distributed marketing platform. With Cortex, you can standardize and streamline operational workflows across branches, create a lean process for getting approvals, optimize budget planning and distribution, plus collaborate more effectively on marketing campaigns.?

Using new tech to build more rewarding retail experiences?

As the retail industry moves from omnichannel (selling through multi-channels) to unified commerce (ensuring a consistent experience no matter the used channel), retailers’ reliance on technology will only get stronger. Moreover, AdTech solutions like the one offered by ADvendio, which specializes in Salesforce-powered ad management software and also attended RTS, will become increasingly important for the whole industry.?

While emerging technologies can provide significant benefits, it's crucial to recognize that they're only a part of the solution to the challenges you may be facing. In order to maximize the value of your investment in these technologies, it's essential to ensure that they're properly integrated into your existing tech stack.

At Xenoss, we complement clients’ in-house development teams and build custom marketing technology solutions for retail. Turn to us to scale your engineering efforts cost-efficiently.