Watch out for these five retail tech trends in 2018

Machine Learning, Chatbots and Big data ruled the retail technology last season. Robotics and Personalization are among other trends in news this year.

Technology has undoubtedly reshaped the way business is done now. Be it online shopping, machine learning or block chain technology. Ankit Garg, Founder and CEO, Wakefit brings to you five interesting tech trends to watch out in the retail industry.

True omnichannel retail:

The promise of omnichannel has been around for the past 4-5 years, but it has remained a largely unrealised one. The problem was that most of the traditional players with an offline presence were trying to move from their legacy technologies and trying to make the whole offline and online system transform, which made the process slow. But now there is a whole crop of new retailers who were online first, with faster cloud-based technologies from the beginning, and are setting up offline presence to augment the customer experience. Now there is a real opportunity to give a quantum experience jump to customers in their omnichannel buying experience.

Core competency and collaboration:

New age retailers are clearly interested in focusing on their core competency of product innovation. For the rest of the value chain that is needed for their operations, they simply want to create a collaboration economy with partner companies. Usually, it is for procurement, warehousing, offline retailing, logistics are all being done by partners who are focusing on those specific areas and excelling at that function. And all of this collaboration will be technology enabled and driven through APIs.

Mobile is core:

Mobile is going to be central to all retailing strategies, with customers being able to access products for research, reviews, knowledge around product usage and finally purchase. Simply being mobile responsive is not going to be enough anymore. Mobile should be deeply embedded into the complete value chain - from a customer point of view and from an internal company point of view.

Vernacular content:

There is a large population that is hungry for high-quality products that they want to feel empowered in buying. They are keen to see, experience, read about it and buy. This is possible only when there is enough investment in content development and efforts to reach this underserved population.

Personalization is going to be mainstream:

Products and services that are bundled, up-sold or cross-sold based on a deep understanding and relationship with the customer based on extensive data analytics is going to be the norm. Obviously, this should be done without encroaching upon any customer's privacy boundaries, and that is the trick.