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.
As the multichannel expert for BT Expedite, I believe passionately that retailers that join up their various customer touchpoints (Store, Web, Mobile, Call-centre, Email, Social etc) and provide great customer service and brand experience across these touchpoints are on to a winning strategy. Data to back this up in fashion /apparel has been relatively sparse however. As a result, we have spent some time recently looking at the results our customers are achieving. For several years, we have been helping retailers such as Aurora Fashions, Thomas Pink, JJB Sports, New Look and, Lyle & Scott to launch cross-channel programmes using our Integrated Store and Integrated mobile /social solutions. This data pool is now large enough to enabled us to draw some conclusions. Some of the data and trends we picked out include:
1) Click & collect boosts on-line orders by at least 10% with some retailers achieving >30% uplift. This is incremental to year-on-year increases in web sales typically in excess of 20%
2) Best in class retailers are seeing >60% upsell once a customer is in-store to collect their order
3) Transactions through Mobile and Social touchpoints, whilst still low, are increasing at an exponential rate.
These are hard benefits, there are many soft benefits of this cross-channel retail approach including improved customer loyalty and increased staff engagement. You can find out a little bit more directly from our customers Meg Lustman, MD from Warehouse and Jonathan Heilbron, CEO from Thomas Pink in the video below:
Click on the video at any point during play to submit an enquiry
Article by Jason Shorrock, Multichannel Consultant, BT Expedite
The run up to the busiest time of the retail calendar officially started this weekend with the ten week countdown to Christmas! And here at BT Fresca the manic and mayhem has already started, we’ve been going off piste with Snow + Rock and going global with Aurora Fashions.
We constantly strive to help our customers, help their customers, but this week we’ve been especially hard at work playing Santa’s little helper to make the Christmas rush easier for everyone. The new mobile optimised Snow+Rock website has just gone live, making it easier for shoppers to place orders and browse on the go – fantastic if your planning to hit the slopes, or for last minute gift shopping and catching those bargains as soon as they hit the sales.
Around the globe, the Fresca fairies are busy sprinkling their e-commerce magic, already providing websites for Karen Millen, Oasis, Warehouse and Coast for the last five years in the UK and more recently going web optimised. We’ve now pushed them global launching the Karen Millen website in Germany as well as a joint website for Oasis, Warehouse and Coast where customers can shop across the brands all in one site!
Both sites are in local language that support local fulfilment, promotions, payment and customer service tailored for each specific country, and Aurora plan to roll out our platform across even more countries. The web sites will support local payment types such as direct bank transfer and invoice on delivery, and the capacity to manage fulfilment from a local distribution centre.
The Frescacommerce Platform is behind many of the world’s fastest growing and most successful e-commerce web sites. It aims to blend creativity with e-commerce best practice and to integrate back office functions like customer ordering, call centre and fulfilment, to maximise sales while giving customers an engaging online experience.
Hash Ladha, Aurora’s group multichannel director, said: “We are very impressed by the current FrescaCommerce Platform and BT’s development plans for the future. These will help underpin our own plans for growth in Europe, Asia-Pacific and beyond.”
We are very excited about these new sites going live and wish our customers all the best for the Christmas trading period.
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.
We’ve always been a fan of tablet computers and have long thought they could add fantastic value to in-store operations. But when iPads first appeared, we were very sceptical about whether Apple technology was right for our customers.
We have to admit we were wrong. We’ve spent many hours evaluating a range of alternative devices, from HP to Acer. We’re running a pilot at Aurora Fashions and have our clienteling application running on iPads in another major fashion brand. We declare ourselves converted.
Here’s eight reasons why iPads rock in fashion retail!
They help staff serve customers better – staff can photograph customers trying on garments, front and back, so that shoppers can easily see which dress and which colour suits them best, they can look at their own (or a competitor) website and place orders from the fitting room.
They’re great for clienteling – we’ve got a fab iPad clientling application especially designed for fashion but, at a more basic level, we’ve found staff keen to digitise their own “black books.
They help staff and head office communicate better – retailers often email store staff with important information, such as visual merchandising plans. These emails are accessible on the back office PC or at the till. With an iPad, staff can have the right information in their hand, wherever they are in the store. And in colour. We can’t tell you how surprised we are at how many of our customers only have black and white printers in their shops.
Everyone knows how to use one – we don’t underestimate this. People pick up iPads and use them. They don’t ask for the instruction manual or a training course or call the help desk. They just pick them up, turn them on and off they go.
They can double as an EPOS – Store 6, our EPOS software, works great on an iPad and, when the tablet’s not in use, it can dock on top of a cash drawer and double as a fixed till.
They are always on brand – change the wallpaper, add a sleeve and your iPad is immediately reflects your business’s personality.
They don’t run Windows – okay, we all know that there is no Windows device that comes close to the iPad’s usability but we think there’s more than this. Windows = work. Our experience is that people generally only use Windows devices for the purposes they are given them for. In contrast, with iPads people don’t feel constrained by the technology. They experiment, play and come up with use cases nobody had thought of.
They don’t go wrong – it’s early days but we’ve iPad apps deployed at a few retailers and in a number of countries and we’re not getting many service calls. Fingers crossed.
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.
We had unprecedented success at the Retail Systems Awards last night where Integrated Store, our cross-channel solution, won not once but three times.
The combined entry from Aurora Fashions, Thomas Pink and ourselves won “Best multi-channel retailer”, “IT Team of the Year” and “Best Overall Entry”.
The three project teams have worked really hard to deliver the solutions at Warehouse, Oasis, Coast and Thomas Pink in time for Christmas and it was great to see their diligence and professionalism recognised so publicly.The fourth Aurora brand, Karen Millen, goes live early in 2011.
While multichannel is clearly the hottest topic in retail right now, the judges’ citation highlighted how impressed they were to see retailers and suppliers collaborating in new product development.
We’ve known for some time that hard- pressed IT teams need to forge true partnerships with their technology vendors. The exciting thing about this project is that it demonstrates that there’s also value in working closely with non-competing retailers too.
BT were also involved in the mobile gift voucher project for which Oasis and Eagle Eye Solutionswonthe EPoS innovation of the year award.
By the way, since entering these awards, JJB Sports are now also live with Integrated Store, and we are all working on the next phase, to be released in 2011.
