Snippets: Smart store tech

Amazon Go and other "invisible payment" technologies, aimed at reducing or removing physical checkouts from the retail experience, will process over $78 billion in transactions by 2022, up from an expected $9.8 billion this year, a new study from Juniper Research has found. These deployments, in single figures today, will reach over 5,000 retail outlets over the next five years as retailers seek to make consumer experiences frictionless and more engaging. The number of consumers using checkout apps, which allows them to scan their own shopping, will grow from just under four million to over 30 million in the same period. The research, Future In-Store Retail Technologies: Adoption, Implementation & Strategy 2017-2022, found that the cost and complexity of infrastructure integration will constrain deployments of invisible payments systems in the short term. It argues that initially, the majority of revenues from new retail technologies would be derived from checkout apps and automatic scanning.
 
Decline in shipments
 

Worldwide PC shipments totalled 67 million units in the third quarter of 2017, a 3.6 per cent decline from the third quarter of 2016, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. This is the 12th consecutive quarter of declining PC shipments. “While there were signs of stabilisation in the PC industry in key regions, including EMEA, Japan and Latin America, the relatively stable results were offset by the US market, which saw a 10 per cent year-over-year decline in part because of a very weak back-to-school sales season,” said Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. There are ongoing component shortages, with DRAM shortages getting particularly worse during the third quarter of the year compared with the first half of 2017. “The component price hike impacted the consumer PC market as most vendors generally pass the price hike on to consumers, rather than absorbing the cost themselves,” Kitagawa said.