Report: Retailers making physical stores more mobile

Physical stores aren’t going away — at least not those who are integrating mobile solutions into the store experience to keep up with today’s tech-savvy shoppers.



Stores that have digitized their operations through mobility are exceeding customer expectations, according to the “The Future Store Manifesto — 2016 Scorecard,” from Boston Retail Partners, which finds that 78% of retailers plan to use mobile point-of-sale (POS) by 2018.



When looking at specific mobile capabilities, 58% of companies plan to utilize geo-location services within two years, and 51% plan to offer targeted suggested selling based on what is in a retailer’s closet by 2019, the study said.



The introduction of more personalized services also requires more attention to overall support. For example, within five years, 50% of retailers plan to enable shoppers to start an experience in one channel and seamlessly finish it in another. From a security standpoint, 88% of companies plan to have end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to ensure data security by 2019, the study said.



“The unified consumer experience is table stakes today, and retailers know it,” said Eric Olafson, senior VP stores, Salesforce Commerce Cloud. (Salesforce is the report’s sponsor.) “[Retailers] don’t question why they should do unified commerce. They question how — as in, how to break down the silos between digital and store systems to get to the omnichannel use cases. It all starts with a move to a single, real-time view of the consumer, prices and inventory availability across all channels.”