The Ways Crowdsourcing Helps All Parties in the Retail Ecosystem

Technology has hurt traditional retailing, no question about it. Online shopping has transformed consumer behaviour and a growing switch away from physical trips to stores. Yet technology is also providing a number of ways for retailers and product brand owners to use crowdsourcing to improve their offerings and thus the appeal of “going to the shops.” The same technology also enables platforms that make it easier for people to help less-advantaged others who don’t find it as straightforward to do their shopping. This article looks at the ways crowdsourcing helps retail store owners, product brand owners, and retail consumers to create better retail experiences in physical stores.

Crowdsourcing by retailers

Retailers have long known and understood the benefits of asking customers to rate their performance levels against criteria of store cleanliness, an easy to navigate layout, helpful staff, and well-stocked shelves and cabinets. Some of this is factual information, some of it is personal opinion, though it is all based on what the stores are like today.

Looking forward, retailers used to rely on focus groups, consisting usually of six to eight customers in a meeting room guided through a series of questions or statements by a professional moderator. Rather than generate innovative suggestions, they tend to be used more to test reactions to decisions the company has already made. Individuals might hesitate to share their views before they can gauge how the others might judge them. A good moderator will be aware of this and try to steer conversations accordingly, though it remains an issue, like groups being dominated by people with the loudest voices.

Crowdsourcing customer comments and insights online removes these restricting factors because people comment individually, in a location of their choice, and sample sizes can be much larger. Crowdsourcing is much better at opening up a challenging scenario and asking for potential solutions. The people contributing through crowdsourcing are unlikely to be retail experts, though they do tend to be well-educated and may well be experts in other fields. Even at TaskRabbit, where you can crowdsource someone to do your household chores or shopping, 70% hold bachelor’s degrees, 20% hold master’s degrees, and 5% hold a PhD. Non-retail experts have freedom to question basic concepts that retail professionals wouldn’t dare to.?

Platforms including Swagbucks can conduct simple data collections that are more like a traditional survey on what customers think of a current store offering. For crowdsourcing projects where retailers are searching for innovative solutions to challenging issues, they have to be ready to sift through the suggestions put forward, they are not going to receive solutions that can be immediately implemented. Examples include a search in Canada for a solution to help reduce thefts and robberies in liquor stores . Or a retailer may wish to search for innovative ideas among its staff, such as when the UK supermarket Waitrose generated 4,000 ideas from its employees. 13% of the ideas were implemented and the company’s customer satisfaction scores improved.

Crowdsourcing to check product field marketing

The final distance when goods are closest to consumers, literally within arms’ reach of each customer, is when they are furthest from the suppliers, the brand owners. Retailers can provide their suppliers with sales data, though suppliers also want to know their products were on the right shelves, were kept stocked up without any periods of empty shelf space, and that any point-of-sale material was visible. The solution? Brand owners can crowdsource all the information they require through using platforms with access to crowds of shoppers. Crowds of shoppers can cover many stores, answer questions and take photographs. Providing answers and images via an app speeds up the process, and GPS tracking can match them to the right store without them having to provide any details. This also speeds up the process and improves accuracy of reporting.

This is a very competitive and remunerative arena, because the product suppliers have so much at stake. Here are four key players.

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