Artificial Intelligence

The New Year is here, and it’s time to make annual resolutions. When it comes to their IT activities, retailers should resolve to make improvements in the following three areas.

Innovation
The days of IT being responsible for “keeping the lights on” are long over. Enterprise systems are still required to perform basic but crucial tasks such as finance and HR, but any retailer looking to compete in 2016 needs to look far past the boundaries of simple task automation.

The New Year is here, and it’s time to make annual resolutions. When it comes to their IT activities, retailers should resolve to make improvements in the following three areas.

Innovation
The days of IT being responsible for “keeping the lights on” are long over. Enterprise systems are still required to perform basic but crucial tasks such as finance and HR, but any retailer looking to compete in 2016 needs to look far past the boundaries of simple task automation.

Retailers just went through an increasingly digital and mobile holiday season.

According to analysis performed by the IBM Watson business intelligence platform, the average order value for the mobile and desktop shopper combined was $127.49, up 2.5% from 2014 ($124.33).

Consumers also shopped via their mobile devices in growing numbers. Mobile traffic exceeded desktop, traffic, accounting for 52% of all online traffic. This was a 17% increase in mobile traffic from 2014.

A new start-up, Optoro, is offering retailers alternative ways to sell their returned goods via a software platform that tracks returns, assesses, which channel is the most effective for each returned item, and routes products to those channels. While most retailers typically recover only about 20% to 40% of the retail cost of returned goods, Optoro helps companies recoup 50% to 70% of the cost, according to a report by the New York Times.

Smartwatch-based commerce only represents a sliver of total e-commerce, but that may soon be due for a change.

According to new research from Mintel, smartwatch sales are set to boom in the near future. While only 6% of Americans currently own a smartwatch, 21% of consumers who purchased a watch in the past 12 months say they are very interested in the smartwatch trend. And 24% of consumers have bought a watch in the past 12 months.

In the coming year, seamless technologies that blend physical and digital channels will have a major impact on e-commerce.

According to Pitney Bowes, five key developments will primarily drive e-commerce in 2016. These are:

1. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies will drive better business outcomes

Last week, I looked at the top three trends that disrupted how retailers engage their customers during 2015. This week, I predict the top three trends that will set the course for customer engagement in 2016.

As Seen on TV

Retailers and suppliers have a new ally in their efforts to unlock actionable insights from the proliferation of data thanks to what Enhanced Retail Solutions contends is groundbreaking new functionality in its Intelligent Retail Platform.

Which brands will break new ground, fall from grace, or overcome obstacles in 2016? Here’s my list of brands to watch in 2016. Since I couldn’t narrow the list to a handful as I’ve done in past years, I decided to expand the list to 26, one for each letter of the alphabet.

So here’s a brand-builder’s almanac for the coming year:

According to analytics reports from Adobe and RetailNext, online sales trumped bricks-and-mortar over Black Friday weekend and the trend looks to continue throughout the 2015 holiday season.

This signifies a shift that’s been obvious for quite some time — consumers are going digital. Does this mean the brick-and-mortar retailer is dying a slow death? Not a chance.