How retail should deal with the looming uncertainty

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How Retail Should Deal with the Looming
Uncertainty
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Introduction Long before a novel virus
disrupted our everyday lives and, in a way,
forced us to adapt to a new way of living, there
were talks about the Retail apocalypse. Over
the past couple of years, store closures have
happened faster than store openings, while the
overall foot traffic in malls and physical shops
continues to decrease. However, this decrease in
the customers visiting the brick-and-mortar
stores has corresponded with an increase in
online sales. If we look at the numbers, the
overall sales have amplified despite the store
closures. With the COVID-19 outbreak, the
closing speed has accelerated the foot traffic
has nosedived. But, this means that the digital
retail ecosystem in making will simply come to
its conclusion much earlier than it was expected
to. Omni-channel will no longer be an option,
digital transformation will be inevitable. As
people are wary of touching things or even coming
in close contact with others, it is necessary
that retailers step up their game according to
the changing consumer behaviour. As per a recent
report, 58 of the people are likely to avoid
public areas such as shopping malls amid the
worsening outbreak. Estimates of sales volume
through online grocery delivery in Beijing were
reported to be two to three times as high as
before the outbreak.
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Gartner research has shown that more than 80 of
retailers have or plan to implement AI solutions
across 5 key merchandising processes by 2021
product development and selection planning
buying demand forecasting and allocation and
replenishment to better deal with situations like
the COVID-19 pandemic better. The analyst
predicts that Retailers that do not renew their
focus on utilizing their store portfolio and on
providing compelling unified retail commerce
consumer-facing experiences will continue to lose
out. They also need to develop realistic and
benefit-adding use cases for AI and ML into their
business operations for core supply chain
planning, forecasting, inventory and
merchandising functions.   We are presenting some
retail software solutions that the industry
should adopt to come out strong from this crisis
and develop greater trust among the customers.
These solutions focus on how retailers can
eliminate or minimize the need for human-to-human
contact for ending the scepticism in their buyers.
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  Building an end-to-end contactless retail
ecosystem RFID-integrated retail inventory
management systems By integrating the in-store
products with RFID tags, the retailers can build
a truly connected inventory, which would not
require any physical contact. RFID-tagged
products can offer real-time insights about
consumer behavior, helping the retailers
understand the demand levels of a product so that
they can stock up the inventory accordingly. At
the same time, this would also enable the
retailers to eliminate such products that are
least on the popularity scale among the
buyers. Artificial Intelligence Machine
Learning solutions can play a crucial role here.
If a consumer visits a store and would like to
check out a products ingredients or expiry date,
they can do so by simply scanning it through an
intelligent application on their phones that
detects the product through the RFID tag and
consequently pulls up all the relevant
information that the user may like to know. At
the checkout counters, the cashier can simply
scan the products with a fixed or hand-held RFID
scanner/reader to bill the customer with the
right price. This way, no real touch happens
between the customers and the store staff, thus,
making the entire buying process comparatively
risk-free. Read Full Blog at https//www.cigniti.
com/blog/supply-chain-slowdown-covid-technology/

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