WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Amazing insights into the mobile industry state and trends.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Andreessen Horowitz, and Benedict Evans in particular, have been known to spot trends long before everyone else. Here again, it appears they are making predictions about retailing - following in the steps of the print industry when Internet came along. Not certain I agree about the parallel but I agree that mobile and AI and other technologies will impact and transform the retail world in the near future. However, as opposed to the print media, retailers often sell physical goods that cannot, for now, be 3D printed at home. So either you pick them up in the store or get it delivered by FedEx or a drone. 

That being said, retail stores are bound to transform in showrooms and service centers as I wrote about in the past. And this is a major shift that many will fail to take.

A review on real-life beacon deployments in retail store tends to demonstrate a resurgence of proximity geographic location tracking.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Digital transformation strategies require that customers are tracked in the real world as much as they are in the web-world. This often means that the mobile devices we carry enable a seamless digital communication - tools to push promotions and notifications while we walk the street or store aisles. To do so, retailers must know where you are and geofencing is not enough anymore. Beacons come to the rescue and mobile OSes - both Apple and Google - now build into their APIs very good location services which allow mobile app developers ways to connect with users in a very personal way. Using GPS location is not sufficient, especially indoors, so beacons are a must and reports such as this one show that our physical world has become a forest of digital beacons to track our every moves. We all thought this technology was dead after the initial failure of the 2013 Apple announcement. However, all retailers should now include geolocation and proximity tracking in their digital strategies and mid-term roadmaps, as it has apparently moved from the lab to the real world.

More on location services in the OSes, see the following links:

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/LocationAwarenessPG/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009497-CH1-SW1

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location/index.html 

Explains how runkeeper uses eCommerce to reward customers and achieve impressive conversion rates of 4% to 7%.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

We too often think of eCommerce in classic, undifferentiated terms: catalog of products, shopping cart, checkout. This paper offers an interesting twist to the whole thing, embedding eCommerce within the mobile app and unlocking certain products based on goals achieved by customers. Retailers should apply this approach to leverage their eCommerce platform beyond the classic website: behaviour-based rewards, special categories, loyalty-based commerce, mobile commerce, social commerce, etc. The eCommerce platform should become a platform not merely a transactional tool.