Ecommerce sites can analyse customer patterns, product interactions, and cross-sell recommendations. Physical store retailers increasingly need to leverage their treasure troves of data to generate similar insights. When collected accurately and analysed quickly, the data already residing on-site can predict demand, optimise inventory, deliver improved customer experiences, and manage those ever-demanding expectations.

Customer expectations are growing

Retailers have one chance to deliver a positive in-store experience. The Adyen Retail Australia Retail 2022 Report revealed that Australians love shopping online, spending AUD 52.7 billion in 2022. However, 73 per cent of survey respondents say they still prefer to shop in a brick-and-mortar store, stating that a physical store is an important ‘touch point’.

Innovative retailers are tapping into data in their stores to better meet these customer expectations by modernising their stores through cloud-native technologies, optimising them for on-site deployment. Leveraging advances in infrastructure, data management capabilities and core  operations, retailers canutilise data generated in stores to transform the customer journey at every touch point.

One of the biggest challenges retailers face is having legacy single-use edge implementations which can each end up siloed across fleets of stores. This creates IT complexity and data silos. So how can open- edge technologies help retailers transform the shopping experience while achieving profitable growth?

Here are a few ways:

1. Infusing intelligence to drive brick-and-mortar transformation

Unified commerce experiences are the new retail frontier. When a shopper visits a store, they expect the same convenience and consistency of an online experience. It’s not just about unified inventory management. The customer journey into a physical store often starts and ends in the digital realm. All channels, portals and data must behave in concert. With edge computing, delivering a seamless
experience across digital and physical stores can be made possible. 

Retailers can implement sensors and other devices at the edge or in-store and analyse the resulting real- time data for intelligent business decision-making. An example of this is being able to send personalised in-store discounts or promotions to customers based on their past behaviours.

Applying insights from online and in-store shopping behaviour also allows retailers to increase basket size with personalised recommendations and promotions. From an operational standpoint, aggregating these individual shopping behaviours and patterns empowers retailers to improve customer satisfaction, optimise inventory and shrink unnecessary costs.

2. Optimising logistics and supply chain processes

There’s been an explosive rise in on-demand delivery services for retail. Australia Post eCommerce Industry Report 2022 disclosed that the growth in online shopping over the last two years brought Australia closer to where many global eCommerce leaders were pre-pandemic. In 2022, Inside Retailer reported that 49 per cent of Australian consumers preferred Click & Collect as their primary means of fulfilment for food and medicine, with 41 per cent choosing it across more impulse categories. Even retailers that have developed lean and optimised fulfilment operations can find this acceleration challenging as customer orders pour in through multiple channels simultaneously, and the timeline for covering inventory errors erodes to minutes.

With edge infrastructure, brick-and-mortar retailers can accurately read inventory levels across the entire operation, including distribution centres, stores and fulfilment centres. Retailers can leverage their local stores as micro-fulfilment centres for rapid deployment of online orders, improving delivery times and options for customers.

Edge computing and solutions such as computer vision and radio frequency identification (RFID) can help drive supply chain visibility and optimise logistics processes. Increasing accuracy and implementing more automation throughout the distribution chain improves inventory sharing across sites to handle the peaks and troughs of business.

3. Improving the bottom line through cost optimisation
Edge computing can support retailers in automating repeatable processes and improve store operations, saving them time and money. For example, conversational artificial intelligence can enable drive- through retailers to offer personalised menus based on prior purchases and enhance the accuracy of the customer’s order, helping businesses stay open when faced with labour shortages.

According to PayPal, the most significant online shopping sales dates in Australia are Click Frenzy, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and Chinese New Year. An intelligent scheduling system integrated with a store’s camera network could automatically direct store associates to checkout lanes to reduce congestion, clean up a spill or restock an item once stores are bare.

Connecting the digital and physical
The future of retail is about connecting the digital and physical worlds. To deliver an optimal customer experience, retailers must strategically shift processes and technology capabilities.

The opportunities to innovate with data by delivering real-time insights at the edge are endless, but organisations need the right infrastructure in place. Embracing an open architecture that secures and consolidates the edge can drive exceptional results.