What we Learned from Shoptalk16

Shoptalk, is a tech event on the intersection of Retail, commerce, tech, startups, tech providers and investors with a mid-May occurrence hosted in Las Vegas. This inaugural event was particularly good, representative of the fastly changing retail omnichannel space. 

Shoptalk as a Precursor Discussion on Unified Commerce 

How digital devices are changing the consumer experience, is a central theme of how ecommerce and omnichannel are evolving and set to enter a unified commerce era. 

We live in an increasingly frictionless world of mobile shopping where what it means to be a retailer and online retailer is changing and evolving each month. Thought-leaders debate it, but the experience is scaling at a pace led by platforms like Amazon, as there have been increasing discussions on the fate of brick-and-mortar stores adapting to the instant digital customer experiences now possible. 

The Sin City event grew to about 3,000 excited attendees ready to feel the 3 interactive days of top content and the usual monumental insights from C-level executives, retail influencers and tech entrepreneurs. The digital influence on commerce, has never been greater! 

The conference agenda focused on three pillars of consumer behavior:

1. How consumers discover
2. How consumers shop
3. How consumers buy

Strangely the most important pillar, how consumers engage, was mysteriously absent. The digital influence of customer acquisition strategies is one of the deal breakers the Retail stores of today. The influence of technology on the customer experience has now in 2016, burst through a breaking point of critical salience to the livelihood of retailers. 

Brick and Mortar Challenges 

We still love to shop, and 93% of total retail sales are still generated in brick & mortar stores but this is rapidly changing, even if current sales value of U.S. brick & mortar retailers is $3.9 trillion.

This is because two-thirds of consumers who buy online interact with a physical store before or after their purchase. Click and brick and brick & click is now embedded with how we interact with B&M stores. 

Consumers still crave the in-store shopping experience but the rich and humanistic connections they expect and enabling a better customer experience that engages consumers with retail brands, is increasingly being implicated by new technology. 

Retail stores must get people in the door and provide experiences that are contemporary with today's technological innovations, seamless and integrate top notch customer service with increased personalization, loyalty-marketing, product education and in-store optimization. 

The Digital Customer Journey 

Engaging your top consumers means a varied approach to the customer journey, from driving in-store mobile engagement to creating a unique and memorable experience for them is seen as key. Part of this for retailers is also hiring the right staff. 

#Shoptalk16, as a next gen commerce event, featured over 300 speakers across 100 sessions with 220 exhibitors and 100+ media personnel. It fills a niche between the Retail and Ecom sectors that becoming mission critical for the ROI of many kinds of companies and retail verticals themselves. 

Customer centricity is evolving, the 400 year old department store to mobile point of sale vendors and same day delivery, means retail is being disrupted by technology and how consumers experience the world differently.

Mobile shopping is just the beginning, social commerce is evolving and will scale into VR soon. Real-time retail marketing that's personalized and of the SMS variety is becoming more common. 

Immersive Retail 

Mobile is influencing over 80% of purchases, and payment systems and point of sale systems are becoming more relevant to retailers every year. 

Shopping is no longer a Destination activity, it's a constant search for convenience. 

The retail industry late to the game, is having to catch up and this is changing how big-box retail scales and how independent retailers can "hang on" to their SMBs. 

Retail in the Cloud 

Software, machine-learning, Big Data, data-driven automation, it's all becoming more relevant to retail and the customer journey. New solutions and startups are competing every year to bring the data-age to retail and help B&M retailers keep up with the Amazons. 

Commerce on social media was a big part of the discussion at Shoptalk, and how scommerce can scale, which will depend on how content and social media evolve themselves as with the chat-bots of SMS. 

The automation of a Pepper robot or a chat-bot that can text a shopper in real-time means the age of human customer service being primary, may be at a close.

Omnichannel Buffs

 In an age of digital receipts, augmented reality, ibeacons and analytics in retail, the importance of better data to personalize and automate exceptional retail consumer experiences has never been so pervasive and mainstream as a recognition then of the Retail industry today. Stores and people matter tremendously, but how they engage has changed, is changing and retailers must adapt or face extinction. 

Analytics of Retail 

Shoptalk reminded us that the data-rich environments of ecommerce are now going live in the physical stores as data points increase and are able to track customers who have opted-in to a loyalty program, downloaded an app, etc...Data at the service of the the customer experience means many things and parts of the equation in retail are likely still missing in relation to Big Data and in the evolution of predictive analytics in Retail. 

Re-Commerce 

Wal-Mart symbolic of a previous era of disruption now has competition from Amazon. The most cited source of Shoptalk, was clearly the disruptor in the driver's seat. Re-sale and peer to peer commerce were also discussed, as the panel on the interesting  Poshmark (community of individual resellers), Tradesy(individual resellers, but with centralized returns), thredUP (online resale shop w/ major retail partnerships), and Vestiaire Collective (EU-based online luxury consignment shop). 

In this series, professionals at Shoptalk discuss the most pressing issues facing their industries today. Write your own #Shoptalk16 post here.

Next Wave Commerce

There is no shortage of what's to come for Retail as well as demonstrated by B2B and B2C solutions, such as these 15 companies ranged from Augmented Reality to bodyscanning  to a mobile-first Ecom platform. Personalizing the upsell, such as  psychology-based product recommendations shows that retail marketing still has  long ways to go. 

Bridging Divide or Expanding Abyss?

One of the more perplexing matters of the space is can technology bridge the divide between ecommerce and physical retail faster than other technologies can divide the gap? That's the catch 22 of how consumers are increasingly relating to commerce. They want the convenience and lowest prices, but they also want the personalized experiences and intimate sensory of social in person shopping. 

Retailers who just do B&M or ecommerce well, are missing the opportunity to deliver to all kinds of customers valuable retail experiences. Retail has to adapt to the changing habits of consumers, not the other way around.

We live in a retail-tech-disruption era, where those retailers who cannot bridge the divide and offer exceptional consumer experiences will churn from their industry. 

Socialized to Consume 

On the consumer side, there are some alarming stats that portray the strange relationship of the economy with retail consumption, such as: 

• 55% of Americans spend as much as they make each month, or more.
• Nearly half of American adults are financially fragile and living very close to the financial edge.
• 71% are concerned about having enough money to cover everyday expenses.

Clearly, the retail climate is not ideal. If Retail rents are up, and sales are down, where do the positive margins come from to make up the difference?

Behind, With or Beyond Amazon

When Amazon launched in 1995, a bit more than a mere decade ago, ecommerce was just getting started, now it has morphed into a whole ecosystem of mobile commerce and offering a new level of convenience and fun in shopping digitally. 

Commodity commerce entails that people can easily buy and sell everyday goods on the internet at the lowest prices, making B&M retail significantly handicapped and out of the loop. As retail moves more from transaction to personalization of the consumer experience, stores are finding new ways to engage with consumers. 

Now we are entering an era of emotional commerce, where subtle nuances of the consumer's experience can be optimized. Pepper the android, has virtual emotions that can interact and bridge the gap of the customer experience with another kind of marketing platform that physical retail will likely use to its benefit. Nonetheless, influencer marketing and an era of marketing to Millennials has ushered in a new way of relating with consumers. 

• User generated content
• Corporate social responsibility 
• Video marketing that plays on the psychology of emotions (and viral marketing) 
• Retail brands contributing and getting involved in social justice causes, etc...

Future of B&M Retail 

Meanwhile the physical retailers will have to rely more on software, cloud POS, automation, algorithms and AI personalization that will change how retail does customer service, marketing, cuts expenses, reduces staff, optimizes customer experience and matches products with customers. 

This technology will range from facial recognition to IoT, to more sophisticated real-time use of machine learning that knows your customers better than any human being can or could. 

What are your key takeaways from Shoptalk and how do you see Retail evolving with technology for the rest of 2016 and in 2017?