Trends in Retailing

In the retail industry, customers are increasingly demanding a new experience in relation to the buying process. As such, they expect more personalized and relevant buying experience that will offer more value. The experience relates to the various trends which have informed the preferred and easy buying process from enquiring, delivery and payment. The retail industry is moving towards a subscription economy, a model that is changing the approach of the consumers to ownership where attitude towards owning products is changing. These customers are having more interest in renting various products especially from high value street brands. In the delivery of products aspects such as crowd sourcing is making the process quite cheap by providing new services that take advantage of freelance workforce or the journeys already being made by retailers (Deloitte, 2016). This has resulted to very quick deliveries with some taking a little time as an hour.

Many savvy retailers are tapping into the advancements in deep analytics, machine learning and even artificial intelligence to achieve more personalized buying experience. This means that consumers are turning to digital platforms where retailers obtained personal details such as profiles in social media, buying histories and interests. This is providing an opportunity for the retailers to provide a selection of products which is tailored towards customer needs. In addition, the use of social media is informing the adoption of direct buying in social channels since these networks are integrating commerce more successfully (Pearson, 2016).

Moreover, retailers are endeavoring to bring about internal re-organization changes through fundamental restructuring in order to respond to Omni-channel. This involves designing the operations around consumer experience instead of using a channel, and traditional departments are brought together so as to facilitate real-time transactions (Pearson, 2016).

References

Pearson, B. (2016).7 Under-The-Radar Retail Trends for 2017. Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanpearson/2016/12/28/7-under-the-radar-retail-trends-for-2017/#3d53c32d1ba7