Drawing on one of the biggest Research and Development centres in the world (Adastral Park), our showcase will be crammed full of the very latest retail technology, from digital signage and social commerce to clienteling and mobile point of sale.
You often see the “future of retail” at these events and are left scratching your head as to how exactly it will work. That’s why we’ll have real working demos of everything on show.
Because it’s not about some fantasy future – the products and services we’re demoing are based on current trends, things that are bubbling under the surface now. And products and services we’re putting into place right now.
Make no bones about it – technology is changing the way we shop.
Take mobile, for example. With smartphone wielding, product savvy customers setting the agenda, retailers need to arm their sale staff with access to the same info. That means in-store wi-fi and mobile devices.
But sexy in-store iPads won’t produce any results if the infrastructure underpinning all of it isn’t right. That’s why the future of retail is all about the plumbing – or wiring if you prefer.
This might not be as exciting as tablet devices and interactive signage, but it’s the fundamental stuff that will make or break your multichannel approach. Having customer and stock data at your fingertips will help you understand your customers and be able to personalise the shopping experience.
So as well as all the neat gizmos and gadgets to dazzle customers, we can make sure that everything works together – that all the disparate channels come together in one integrated system. As well as removing the complexity – we can host everything remotely so your bandwidth can flex up and down as you need it – this will also help remove cost from your business.
New York’s National Retail Federation (NRF) 2012 conference theme was Retail’s New Rules, and it focused on how retailers and innovators are reshaping the conventional rules of the game.
My favourite town, my favourite show. New York’s National Retail Federation (NRF) 2012 conference theme was Retail’s New Rules, and it focused on how retailers and innovators are reshaping the conventional rules of the game.
It was bigger, better and busier than ever, with 400 exhibitors and over 25,000 attendees from 78 countries. And Bill Clinton headlining! And, for me, this year’s big ideas were:
Consumer reigns Epicor’s booth showed that consumer devices reign supreme: Business Intelligence (BI) portals, assisted service, clienteling – all served up on shiny tablet devices. Equally exciting, was acceptance that customer engagement rules are changing and in response to this, our newly launched Clienteling app attracted lots of attention around the show.
‘Omni-commerce’ At the conference, I asked US retailers for their views on the subject of centrally hosted versus distributed POS systems. In previous years, US retailers have shown little interest in this deployment model, in stark contrast to their UK counterparts.
But this year there was a definite shift in attitude; among the IT attendees, the key words were resilience, virtualisation and security. And their Business and Marketing colleague’s phrases like ‘customer experience’ and ‘cross-channel’ – or the new buzz phrase at the show – ‘omni-commerce’.
Maximum security Overlaid on top of the cloud, security and PCI were also major themes. Network vendors promising the ‘elixir to PCI’ were around every corner; secure networks, secure wi-fi, secure platforms.
Clicks and mortar A different perspective on Payment was provided by PayPal, whose booth was drawing in the crowds with their cross-channel vision and inexorable push into ‘bricks and mortar’. It’s part of a process that’s moving payment from the wallet to the smartphone, with personalised pricing and promotions, while consumers shop. PayPal’s new strapline ‘Now the Best in Both Worlds’ shows Great vision in a fast moving area. Watch this space!
My summary of this year’s show: Bigger than ever, lots of optimism. Technology is where it’s at. Not just technology to meet the fast moving shopping habits of consumers, but technology that supports global reach, because that’s where the growth is. By the end of the show I was exhausted but more enthused about the future of retail and the systems that underpin it than previous years. Roll on 2012.
At BT Fresca, we’ve just had a peek at the stats from this year’s online Christmas sales. They reveal that retailers delivered their best ever trading figures on our FrescaCommerce Platform during Christmas 2011, with daily sales up an average 46 per cent on last year. 30 November 2011, ‘Whopping Wednesday’, was the most popular shopping day, coinciding with industrial action by many workers across the UK, followed by ‘Manic Monday’ (28 November) and ‘Cyber Monday’ (5 December).
Predictions from some commentators that Christmas Day would be more popular than Boxing Day (when post-Christmas sales are officially launched) were dumbfounded, with 26 December continuing to be the most popular post-Christmas shopping day.
We work with a whole host of retailers, having created online stores for leading fashion and lifestyle brands such as Coast, Great Little Trading Company, Habitat, Jane Norman, JJB Sports, Karen Millen, Matalan, Matches Fashion, Oasis, The Perfume Shop, Snow+Rock, Thomas Pink, TJ Hughes and Warehouse.
This was a record breaking Christmas period with the highest ever weekly, daily and hourly traffic volumes and transactions, as shoppers took full advantage of promotional activity. The two week period at the end of November and the beginning of December was considerably busier than the pronounced spike experienced in 2010. This Christmas also saw a growing trend for ‘early week’ shopping with Sunday evenings and Mondays being particularly busy. Another trend is the increasing use of ‘flash sales’ to drive traffic.
2011 showed a differing trend to previous years with a number of peaks in orders volumes as opposed to just one. It’s also interesting that the week leading up to Christmas, historically a ‘no-go’ for online retailers, is now coming into its own. Even at 20 December, there were still high order volumes, at least as high as the beginning of November, in part due to sharpened delivery strategies, giving customers confidence their orders will arrive before the big day.
While total order numbers have grown in 2011, average values of orders have dipped for many retailers, reflecting the high levels of promotional activity and re-enforcing the trend that more and more value retailers are moving online and promoting this channel to their customers.
Whether or not people were striking or working from home or simply unable to get to work because of the industrial action it seems many decided November 30 was a good time to do their Christmas shopping online.
Compared to Christmas 2010, Christmas 2011 represented Year on Year (YoY) changes in:
• Order Volume of +46%
• Order Value of +20%
• Average Order Value of -18%
Compared with last year, 2011 represented Year on Year (YoY) changes in:
• Order Volume of +58%
• Order Value of +32%
• Average Order Value of -17%
Written by Richard Vining, Head of FCP Performance
Rich Lowe has been promoted to run BT’s global audio and video conferencing business. We’re sad to see him go but delighted that Richard Dodd (our COO) is taking over. For those of you who don’t know Richard, he’s a poacher turned gamekeeper. After many years at Tesco, latterly as International Store Operations and IT Director, he joined us in 2006. Firstly as CTO and latterly as COO, Richard has been the intellectual force behind our multi-channel vision and is always looking out for the latest innovations to bring our clients.
Our customers will get to hear more from Richard at our next client conference but he’s a big fan of social media and you follow him @richard_m_dodd or via LinkedIn.
The Internet Retailing conference (October 4th, Novotel, Hammersmith) always focusses on the latest on-line developments and this year revealed a growing chasm between the old and the new. What is different this time is that the new “old” is about old-fashioned, nothing to do with number of years trading.
Resting on the old-fashioned cliff-side are some relatively recent retailers, ASOS (founded in 2000), eBay (1995) together with an analog and digital media pioneer, HMV (1899). Staking claim to the new ground are traditional high street names such as Burberry (1856), Thomas Pink (1984), Aurora Fashions (Coast, 1996; Oasis, 1991 & Warehouse, 1976) mixed in with the cream of social networking Facebook (2004) and a revolutionary delivery company, Shutl (2008).
What sets them apart? A true appreciation of their customers’ multichannel lives.
For example, yesterday ex-ASOS visionary Hash Ladha, now 18 months in as multichannel director at Aurora Fashions announced the latest tranche of UK cities to be covered by his fashion industry leading 90 minute delivery service. By February 2012, 90% of the UK can order a dress late afternoon and be wearing it the same evening. Why does this make pure-play retailers like ASOS look old? Because ASOS do not have the nationwide store coverage to support this type of ship from store to home service. Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO, has long muted the possibility of a single ASOS store on Oxford Street, but even that’s a long way from the 50 or so stores required for pan-UK coverage.
The retail equivalent of Apple, Burberry’s recent tie-up with Salesforce.com underlines the absolute need to focus on your customer wherever she happens to be. In the same vein, presenting creative innovation yesterday, Nadine Sharara, e-commerce director at Thomas Pink, underscored the need for absolute quality and consistency of brand regardless of channel. The beautifully British Brideshead revisited theme of this years A/W campaign oozes the kind of high end luxury that thrives in the harshest recession. And the execution from store through to on-line is truly multichannel.
Of the keynotes that kicked off the conference yesterday, eBay sounded tired as it talked up its outlet channels and social media heritage. Conversely, head of Facebook commerce partnerships, Gavin Sathianathan, is effortlessly cool and unceasingly innovative as he describes the stories of the 800 million people that make up the Facebook world and the opportunities for retailers to join them.
So if e-commerce sounded old yesterday, true multichannel retailers are fresher than ever, buoyed by their years of trading and customer focus.
Now in its ninth year and sponsored by BT Expedite and BT Fresca for the third year running, Martec International has just published the IT in Retail Survey 2011-12. The study covers 150 of the largest retailers in the UK and represents something like 75% of all retail sales. Data is gathered by interview with CIOs or other executives responsible for IT and two versions of the report are published – the Top 100 Retailers and the Top 125 Non-Food Retailers.
The first key finding is that IT budgets as a percentage of sales have declined yet again. Now at 1% sales overall, they were 1.1% sales for the two previous years and 1.3% of sales for the 4 years before that. By segment, the range is wide with grocers averaging 0.7% sales and non-store retailers averaging 3.4%. Recent years have been tough for CIOs managing shrinking budgets, a problem compounded by the growing spend on e-commerce and mobile commerce applications.
E-Commerce sales were 8.5% of total sales for the non-food group, an increase of 9% on last year. For the top 100 retailers which includes: grocers, e-commerce sales were static at 6.3% sales. However, this is distorted by the fact that new entrants to e-commerce pulled the average down while established retailers grew their online sales. For the first time ever, two retailers said that they expected to do smaller online sales as a percentage of total sales, both companies with a high online share, which might start to indicate that for brick and mortar retailers moving online, somewhere in the range of 30%-40% of total sales is where the online share might top out.
2011 was the year that mobile commerce took off. Amongst the top 100, 16% are using mobile commerce already and 12% plan to in the next year. Amongst the top 125 non-food retailers 14% are using mobile commerce and 18% plan to in the next year. Kiosk usage is also expected to be a lot higher.
Martec asked retailers to identify their top spending priorities and for the first year ever, e-commerce was the front runner in the top 100 retailers and the top 125. Store systems came second in both cases but the percentage of retailers planning store systems improvements is well down on recent years.
Retailers have been forced to invest in e-commerce and mobile commerce and because of shrinking budgets they have had to cut elsewhere. In recent years there has been a rise in outsourcing and off-shoring though this year’s survey shows no growth in that area, probably because those inclined to do it have done so already. However, there are many retailers planning to replace or upgrade applications like merchandise management and supply chain and add applications like CRM and merchandise planning.
Martec believes that this year may be the last in which retailers can manage on reduced budgets and that they will have to start going up again soon. If 2012 is the year of the recovery, it will put greater pressure on retailers and their systems. The wise among us will start investing now to grab market share as the economy improves.
Blog post by Brian Hume, Managing Director – Martec International
For more information or to download a summary of the IT in Retail reports click here
Pretty much every night of the week, the glamorous hotels that line London’s Park Lane are filled to bursting with the brightest and best of the business world. Every sector of society has its own awards night when, dressed in black tie or ball gowns, executives from Britain’s top organisations flock with fingers crossed to the heart of the West End. Last Tuesday was our night, the night of the BT Retail Week Technology Awards.
Giving awards in the business world can seem a little trivial at a time of austerity but, with people often working longer hours with fewer resources, there’s no better moment to publically recognise success. And we can testify from our own experience that a sliver-winning project team will return from London brighter and better motivated than when they left, albeit with eyelids propped open with matchsticks for a few days. Trophies look great in the boardroom too.
This is the second year we’ve sponsored the Retail Week Technology Awards. It’s a great hospitality and networking event where we can meet existing and potential customers in informal – but heavily branded – surroundings. You can network equally well in a box at Lords but associating our brand strongly with a leading publication, and with innovation pays dividends. The other positive about awards sponsorship is that we get plenty of brand awareness in the run up to the event, as the organisers crank up their marketing, and afterwards as the winners publicise their success.
This year, there were many worthy winners and you can find out who they were and why they won on the Retail Week Technology awards 2011 website. I’d like to highlight two of my favourites. The first is the surprise success of Whistles (one of our customers) in the Best Project Implementation category which shows that smaller retailers can compete on the big stage. The second is Shutl’s success with Argos. Shutl offer 90 minute delivery of online orders by sending a local courier to pick up the goods from store. This turns shops into a competitive advantage for multichannel retailers versus the pure plays and is the most innovative application of technology to a retail business problem for a while. We’ve subsequently implemented Shutl linking to our Integrated Store product at Aurora Fashions.
So, that’s it for the BT Retail Week Technology Awards for this year but the brightest and best in retail technology will be reconvening in Park Lane in the Autumn for the Retail Systems bash. Maybe we’ll see you there.
Blog post by Geoffrey Barraclough – Director, Strategy, Marketing & Propositions, BT Expedite
What do you want, difficult challenges or beautiful problems?
If your answer is “neither, I’d prefer an easy life”, you’re probably not cut out for retail.
At last week’s BT Expedite and Fresca Retail Client Conference we had over 80 delegates from some of the UK’s (and the world’s) leading retailers lock themselves away for two days to get down to the real nitty-gritty of retail IT. It wasn’t for the faint-hearted.
This annual event is getting bigger – and better – every year. This year there were more retailer-led sessions, more technology demos and more user groups than ever before. We even had Kryten from Red Dwarf.
And there seems to be a little more optimism around again. We’re not completely out of the woods – it is retail we’re talking about here – but things are looking up.
Last year we gathered together like post-apocalyptic survivors, guiltily checking off the names of those who had gone under in the previous six months. We were in the midst of a massive economic downturn and all thought revolved around survival. So what’s changed?
Two things stood out: Social media and international expansion. It seems, like life, retail will always find a way.
The 40+ retailers who crammed into the first, steamy breakout session of the day highlighted this. During the session, Lyle & Scott’s Will Dymott outlined the brand’s website refresh and mobile focus, and ran through its social media strategy and successes. He presented himself as a bit out of touch with it all – drawing inspiration from the derision of his nieces – but it’s clear the success is no happy accident. Lyle & Scott has developed a ferociously loyal following – and there’s no great secret to it, as Will pointed out. If you’re going to get involved, get involved properly. So Lyle & Scott takes a very active part in their customers’ social networking. This takes in everything from organising Twitter races and underground music events to launching a Facebook commerce page.
In the afternoon, another standing-room only session explored international expansion – with two retailers offering a different take on it. One, Aurora Fashions, has gone down the e-commerce route. The other, Aldo Group, is working through franchisees. Both have had successful years. Both have made mistakes – and have learned from them.
And it was in this session that I heard about “a beautiful problem”. It summed up the whole mood at this year’s conference. And the nice thing is, we’re talking about the same old problems, but we’re looking at them in a different way. The world is no longer lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce out and crush you. We’re not automatically taking defensive measures. There’s a whole world of opportunity out there now – with no more difficult challenges, just lots of beautiful problems.
In this world of multiple channels, always on, 24/7, 99.999% up time, as technologists it’s rare to find time to pause for breath. So to be able to relax in the comfortable surroundings of Chicheley Hall for our bi-annual customer CIO Forum, pausing for reflection and chewing the fat with ones colleagues and CIOs from some of our leading clients was a welcome diversion. Not that there was much fat on a meal that included an entire stuffed quail, followed by venison, mind you. For the former was it really Quail or perhaps the smallness of the bird was because we were simply eating from a long way away, driven by talk of applications provided on the cloud, obscuring our vision.
Prior to this veritable feast, conversation had raged round the table, amongst BT Expedite management, and retailers from the clothing, footwear, pets, automotive accessories and outdoor sectors. Key themes that emerged included the following:
How can retailers retain control of brand values, yet put the customer at the centre of the business? Would the move to providing more product information, opening up Facebook channels and customers using their smart phones to research, lead to the loss of control of brand, or would product always be king? Perhaps it depends on the sector of retailer?
Should retailers spend money training their staff on their increasingly diverse product ranges, or perhaps focus on providing detailed content directly to the increasingly savvy consumer, via iPad and iPhone channels? Would customers see that as a service?
When would we see the death of fixed POS devices, chained to desks, only there to take money? Would the increasingly sophisticated product information and multichannel needs of stores finally result in moving to a true point of service environment, enabled by tablet and/or retail hardened iPad devices, with customers paying by their own smart phones?
When will we see the end of paper based receipts, replaced by emails containing all the relevant information? Wouldn’t that be an easier way for customers to manage things when you need to provide proof of purchase, when things go wrong?
As ever what is happening over the pond and particularly what was previewed at the recent NRF show was a topic of general interest. Could an idea like the Adidas information wall where the in store range could be supplemented by technology capable of viewing items in 3D have general use? Would the iPad really be robust enough to withstand retrials usage, or would these devices simply disappear from the store? Who knows but dinner was nearly upon us….
Full of Quail and Venison, we then listened to BT plans for the 2012 Olympics, frighteningly not much more than 500 days way. We learned, how BT is a key sponsor, also commissioned to provide all the telecommunications for the Olympics itself, the visitors and broadcasters, something that had never been done before. With the massive uptake of smart phones, we could only imagine the massive bandwidth requirements, the thousands of miles of cabling and the work this entailed. Our retailers’ attention was held by talk about the opportunities for pop-up shops around the country, at the various council led venues and whether this was practical. Time will tell I guess, but retailers being retailers, I am sure they will find a way.
As the evening drifted on our minds became focussed on more pressing subjects, so we drifted towards the bar and eventually onwards to bed, wondering what it would have been like to live in this house, perhaps every night was a Quail night….
After a couple of quiet year’s NRF was buzzing again last week as the cream of the world’s retailers (and their suppliers) were shoe-horned into New York’s most dilapidated convention centre for three days of frantic networking.
From a business perspective, China is top of the agenda. You could palpably feel the excitement of US retailers salivating at the prospect of selling into this enormous and fast growing market. Why worry about the US consumer recession when you can have a joint venture with the Chinese Post Office? It has 330.000 branches. Enough said.
Other emerging markets got a mention; notably Brazil which contributed fully one third of all non-US delegates to the conference. That’s worth saying restating. It was a convention in New York with twice as many Brazilians as Canadians. That tells you something about the changing balance of world retailing. In contrast, if there were any Chinese, I didn’t see them. That’s a shame because it would have been fascinating to hear about China from the dragon’s mouth, so to speak, rather than from a series of middle-aged American businessmen.
The second major theme was mobile. It was hard to find a single presentation that didn’t reference the liberating effect of wireless for store operations and of Smartphones for the way shoppers behave in-store. Our three conclusions:
·Stores will have fewer fixed till points and more mobile ones. The mobile ones will be tablet devices which can be used for clientelling, stock-checking and payments.
·Retailers need to promote their app or mobile-optimised website to shoppers before they walk into store. Sephora is a really good case study. Otherwise, shoppers will be wandering around looking at a competitors’ offer on their Smartphone’s screen.
·The rise of mobile makes the staff’s job more complicated and underlines the need to get their whole hearted support. For example, if a retailer is encouraging its customers to browse its full catalogue while wandering around the shop, it needs to be sure its staff are fully conversant with all the products carried, not just those listed for that particular store.
