This report examines digital transformation (DX) in Retail, enabled by the key technology groups that are the focus of Transforma Insights’ research. The report focuses on digitally transformative solutions adopted in physical and online retail environments.
Retailers are reshaping their physical and online store strategies and using digital technological solutions to increase their revenue streams by building brand loyalty and trust and reducing operational costs by decreasing laborious work. Thus, the retail industry has been undergoing tremendous digital transformation to meet shoppers’ changing expectations, and is increasingly offering a hyper-personalised, gamified, and frictionless shopper experience, thanks to the availability of digital tools. Shoppers can benefit from dynamic and automatic adjustments to product shelves to display promotional offers, real-time navigation assistance through stores, AR/VR-enabled applications for virtual experiences of products, and cashier-less stores for smooth checkout.
To offer an engaging shopping experience, retailers are defining their technology adoption roadmap to succeed in the digital era of consumerism by providing differentiated service offerings across shoppers’ different touchpoints. To achieve this, businesses are partnering with technology companies to not only create value-added offerings for shoppers but also streamline their internal operations by investing in sophisticated solutions. Modern-day shoppers expect delightful shopping experience regardless of the mode of shopping (online or offline). They expect a holistic and digitally enabled multichannel shopping experience by virtually trying out merchandise or visualising furniture at their homes by using AR-enabled applications.
Overall, we have identified six key domains of change in retail, which are discussed in more detail in this document. These domains are:
This report focusses on digital transformation in the retail industry as enabled by the key technology groups that are the focus of Transforma Insights’ research. These technology groups comprise:
Clearly, not all of these technology groups are directly relevant to the retail industry, but many of them are highly relevant (including IoT, Hyperconnectivity, Artificial Intelligence, Data Sharing, and others).
Accordingly, the aim of this document is not to chart the future direction of smart retail, but to highlight the key areas of change, enabled by new and emerging technologies. The bulk of this report discusses these key domains of change and includes an overview of each, together with the analysis of the associated business impact. We also identify key enabling technologies for each area (from the list above) and provide summary details of illustrative case studies that are available in Transforma Insights’ Best Practice & Vendor Selection database. Specific Domains of Change within the retail industry are discussed in isolation, although in reality, many of the solutions that are discussed in this report will be deployed alongside each other. In particular, there is significant potential for many of the systems discussed in this report to provide valuable inputs to other systems for instance for supply chain monitoring and developing promotional strategies.
The purpose of the document is two-fold. Firstly, from the perspective of a practitioner working in the smart retail area, the document highlights new and emerging aspects of change that should impact in the next few years. Secondly, from the perspective of potential vendors in the Smart Retail space, it highlights the key emerging areas of opportunity to sell new products, services, and solutions. Our analysis of the key technologies that enable each of the identified areas of digital transformation will help vendors of horizontal (technology-specific) capabilities to identify the contexts in which they may be able to secure new business opportunities.
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