Nowadays, retail—both offline and online—is a highly technologized market sector that makes shopping, selling, and shipping much faster and more effective. While there are many aspects of how technology influences the retail sector, we want to tackle four in this post. If you run a store, especially an online one, read on, as the technologies mentioned below can significantly help you improve your business.
Not long ago, running an online store meant you needed to do the vast majority of work yourself. Thanks to modern technology, it’s all automated, streamlined, and more effective. As a result, online store owners have more time and can focus on more strategic aspects of running an online business.
The first technology we want to show you is marketing automation.
How marketing automation improves e-commerce
Marketing automation is a broad term encompassing a list of actions and features you can automate and implement in your online store. Take emails as an example. Thanks to marketing automation, your online store can automatically send emails to all customers, e.g., regarding:
- A recently purchased product (i.e., order summary email)
- It’s delivery status (frequently with parcel tracking)
- A receipt/invoice
Sending all those emails manually would take a lot of time, especially if you have hundreds of customers every month. Thanks to marketing automation, you don’t need to worry about that – emails are sent without involvement.
It’s the same story with many other aspects of running an online store, e.g.:
- Personalized product recommendations (thanks to marketing automation, you can analyze customer behavior and preferences to deliver tailored product recommendations)
- Cart abandonment recovery (retargeting is based on sending reminders to customers who abandoned their shopping carts to try and re-engage them)
- Website content (with marketing automation, you can dynamically adjust your website’s content and create more personalized and relevant experiences for your store’s visitors)
- Other forms of communication (marketing automation works with email and other communication channels, e.g., text messages and push notifications).
With marketing automation, you can even create whole communication scenarios where your MA platform responds automatically to actions taken by your customers. Take a look at an example of such a scenario:
E-commerce platforms – game-changers in online trade
Theoretically, you could run an online store without an e-commerce platform, and many small businesses (especially local ones) still do. However, there is no exaggeration in saying that those platforms were true game-changers in this industry. With an e-commerce platform, you get a ready-made infrastructure for your business that comes with many useful features such as online payments, managing orders, and adding products to multiple places simultaneously (many e-commerce platforms are integrated with Amazon and other marketplaces to enable multichannel sales).
Today, you can use dozens of e-commerce platforms to set up and run your online business, and they help you save tons of time. Moreover, with an e-commerce platform, you can:
- Showcase your products in many different places
- Automate receiving orders and sending them to your warehouse
- Accept diverse types of payments (e.g., credit cards, instant wire transfers, online wallets, etc.)
- Integrate your store with third-party platforms (e.g., logistics systems)
These are the most popular e-commerce platforms as of 2023 (data provided by Statista). Interestingly, WooCommerce (which has almost 40% market share) is free to use (it’s an open-source platform) but requires some technical expertise to set everything the way you want.
(Conversational) AI streamlines customer service
Artificial intelligence has changed many things regarding online trade, but we want to focus specifically on conversational AI. Thanks to this technology, your customers get access to customer service 24/7 as now they can talk to a smart assistant – a voicebot or a chatbot. In e-commerce, bots are responsible primarily for:
- Responding to frequently asked questions
- Providing product information (e.g., regarding availability)
- Informing about the order status and more
Today, you have access to many ready-made chatbot platforms you can seamlessly integrate with your store. In other words, you don’t have to design your chatbot from scratch. You can use one that’s already developed and just adjust it to your store’s needs. Usually, such adjustments don’t even require technical knowledge as chatbot platform providers offer intuitive drag-and-drop editors so that you can easily move things around the way you want.
One such platform is Ada. With it, you can introduce 24/7 customer service to your store in a few days. Ada will help you communicate with your customers and provide them with the requested information. This chatbot can even automatically generate a return label if a customer wants to return the product!
Mobile POS – retail technology for brick-and-mortar stores
The last thing we want to mention is strictly for brick-and-mortar stores. Mobile POS systems make shopping far more convenient and quicker. These systems typically consist of a mobile application or software that runs on the mobile device and additional hardware accessories like card readers or barcode scanners. With a mobile POS system, your staff can streamline the checkout process and help customers directly on the sales floor.
Some time ago, Nordstrom, an American department store chain, decided to implement over 6,000 mobile POS devices in its stores. As a result, it noted increased sales (over 15% quarter-to-date), but the average selling price and the number of items sold also went up.
Retail technology makes your life and work much easier. Don’t hesitate to see how you can improve your retail business by implementing some of the technologies mentioned in this article. And if you want support with designing and developing your online store, we are at your service!
Reach out to our team today to find out more.
