With the pace of innovation continuing to accelerate, retailers are constantly looking for technology to meet the needs of tomorrow's consumer. To provide a look into the future of retail technology, this year’s Shop.org conference features the Innovation Lab, a carefully selected exhibit of the technologies driving innovation across the shopping journey. NRF chose more than 30 companies from around the globe that represent the newest innovations retailers are using to infuse digital across the shopping journey and accelerate ecommerce. Here’s a sampling of the opportunities you don’t want to miss in each stage of the shopping journey of the future.
Brand and product awareness
The lab begins with the latest advances in tech-powered marketing, showing those tools that are helping retailers attract new customers and retain existing clients. Some of the highlights include:
Outernets’ store window of the future abandons meticulous mannequins product displays, applies machine learning, computer vision, facial tracking and gesture recognition, and generates eye-catching interactive experiences in their place that draw customers into stores.
Smart Pixels shows how they’re helping retailers merge the digital and physical using projected augment reality enabling customers to interact with products in new ways.
Tel Aviv based Oriient, “brings Waze inside retailer locations” by leveraging the earth’s magnetic field and shoppers’ smartphones to help customers navigate stores and search for products.
LuvThat shows how its helps brands create new sales channels in scalable ways through a network of Airbnb hosts.
Product consideration
Next up are the consideration innovators who are enabling retailers to integrate AI, Voice, AR, body scanning, and video to ensure customers make the best purchase decisions in the most convenient ways possible. Here are a few that caught our attention:
Acuity and Jumper.ai enable brands to sell merchandise directly through online videos and social media channels where consumers investigate products they might purchase.
3DLOOK and Savitude leverage mobile body scanning and AI respectively to help e-customers find the clothes that really fit them the first time so they can shop efficiently and avoid expensive returns.
Shoptelligence’s AI assistant helps shoppers discover the clothes and furniture that works with their style while Seek and Meridiun showcase advances to make AR accessible across all retailer platforms.
Customer engagement
Helping make the checkout experience uber-fast, easy and fun are a variety of engagement innovators including:
Hero, who is pioneering a new way to shop by connecting online customers live with associates in-store for style recommendations, livestreams and more.
MishiPay takes the cash register out of the equation with an app that allows in-store shoppers to simply scan, pay and leave without ever waiting in line while RetailDeep recognizes customers by their faces instead of loyalty cards so retailers can get real-time actionable insights to personalize the shopping experience.
Finally, for international customers, Flow helps scale tailoring the customer experience to each retailers market, language, culture and rules, so retailers can expand quickly.
Logistics and loyalty
Rounding out the lab, are the companies making returns, inventory and feedback seamless. Recognizing the digital experience doesn’t need to stop with the purchase at checkout, Inspectorio uses artificial intelligence to deliver a transparent and accurate quality control and compliance platform for major retailers.
AWM Smart Shelf lights up operational efficiencies with their unique shelf-edge LED displays that help boost sales, track on-shelf inventory and more using AI and computer vision.
Chatter Research enables retailers to capture feedback immediately by talking to customers in a completely new way.
And Zigzag helps retailers manage returns globally by connecting customers to over 60 couriers and postal providers in 130 countries to send items back in a variety of different ways.
For more technologies that are changing the shopping journey for customers and retailers alike, check out the Innovation Lab at Shop.org September 13 and 14th in Las Vegas.