Tag: retail

How Retailers Are Fighting Showrooming With Digital Price Tags

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Showrooming refers to the popular practice of consumers visiting retail stores in order to examine an item before buying it online instead, and it is hurting the bottom line of many brick-and-mortar retailers. Lower prices offered by online sellers is a primary reason for showrooming, and that’s why some big-name retail brands, such as Sears, Kohl’s, and Home Depot, are installing digital shelf displays, which allow for real-time adjustment of product prices, at select stores in order to match the low prices shoppers find online.

What Brands Need To Do
While it may be an effective way for physical stores to compete with online marketplaces such as Amazon, it is in fact a rather pricey solution, as digitizing all price tags in one single store could reportedly cost up to six figures. In order to better combat showrooming, retailers need to think about more ways to incorporate their digital assets into physical stores, like what Rebecca Minkoff did, or figure out ways to convert customers to webrooming, which entails product research online before in-store purchase.

 

Source: Bloomberg Business

 

How Macy’s Digitalized Its Flagship Store To Lure Millennial Shoppers

Posted on by Richard Yao

What Happened
Last week, Macy’s unveiled “One Below,” a space designed to court the digitally connected millennial shopper. Located in the basement level of its flagship store in New York’s Herald Square, the space boasts an array of brands that appeal to the generation and has technology as its focal point. It features an interactive touchscreen named “Instagram Wall,” showcasing photos tagged with #Macyslove, and a “Selfie Wall,” which allows shoppers to take a selfie with Macy’s branded images of NYC as backgrounds, in addition to a wearable-tech section, a 3-D printing area, and DIY stations with brands such as Fossil and Levi’s.

What Brands Need To Do
With the rise of ecommerce, brick-and-mortar retailers are facing increasing challenges from the digital stores. And with sales growth slowing down and its average customer age pushing 50, it seems like a logical move for Macy’s to aggressively go after the millennial shoppers with social sharing tools like Instagram Wall and DIY personalization experiences. For brands that own brick-and-mortar retail stores, now is time to embrace the in-store digital installations so as to provide young customers with a fresh, exciting shopping experience that they would love to return to.

 

Source: Digiday

 

How Adblockers Are Messing Up Retailers’ Websites

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The perils that Apple’s ad-blocking extension in iOS 9 inflicted on digital publishers has been well–documented, but one lesser-known impact of those ad-blockers is that it can cause problems with retailers’ ecommerce sites. According to Fortune’s hands-on experiments, multiple major retailers’ digital sales channels would be negatively impacted when popular iOS ad-blocker Crystal is enabled.

The damage varies from site to site: Sears and Walgreens would have an entire webpage wipes out, whereas mobile sites of Lululemon and Walmart lose functioning online shopping carts with Crystal enabled. This is likely a result of some retailers using ad servers as part of their web platform to aid in retargeting, which in turn caused adblockers to wipe out their actual content. What’s more, ad-blockers can also strip out backend shopper behavior-tracking codes like Google Analytics or Adobe’s Omniture, which some retailers rely on for real-time customer insights.

What Brands Need To Do
Just as digital publishers have to get creative and move towards social and native ads in order to deal with the rise of ad-blockers, retailers too need to make it a priority to update the backend of their sites to prevent their web content from being misidentified as ads and getting blocked. Moreover, retailers should consider exploring social commerce enabled by buy buttons or, if resource permits, developing their own branded mobile apps, which the ad-blockers don’t affect, to offer customers a truly controlled mobile shopping experience.

 

Source: Fortune

Rebecca Minkoff Shows The Usefulness Of In-Store Behavioral Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Women’s clothing retailer Rebecca Minkoff opened its first “connected store” in SoHo, NYC last November, integrated with in-store tracking technology powered by eBay. The platform identifies how customers are interacting with products, such as which items are taken into the fitting room, and what’s being purchased or left behind.  The brand has also made changes to its collections based on the insights gained from the tracking data. Almost a year later, the brand has seen some great success, reportedly selling three times more than anticipated.

What Brands Should Do
Traditionally, retail brands tend to focus on analyzing purchase data to determine inventory and corresponding promotional strategies. Rebecca Minkoff’s successful experiment with comprehensive in-store tracking shows that retail brands need to pay attention to other behavioral data that indicates purchase intent, even on a granular item-by-item base, so as to better understand their customers.

 

Source: Digiday

Fashion Meets Live Streaming At NYFW

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The future of New York Fashion Week will be live streamed. While approximately 100,000 people attended last September’s shows in person, 2.6 million live-streamed them instead. This year, the streams are going mobile, as Ralph Lauren announced it’s broadcasting its Collection show live on Periscope next week. Moreover, Rebecca Minkoff recently packaged its fall 2015 show into a virtual reality video with Jaunt, a California-based cinematic VR company, for an immersive viewing experience.

What Brands Should Do
Fashion shows are usually well-produced luxury experiences, and fashion brands would be missing out on the opportunity to reach a wider audience if they don’t take advantage of nascent media platforms and emerging technologies. Moreover, brands like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger have started to include buy buttons on their live streams that link to their online shops, turning the content streams into direct sales channels, something that more brands should explore.

 

Source: Racked

Uber Readies Push into E-Commerce Delivery

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Uber is slowly unveiling its plan to enter ecommerce with a strategic partnership with dozens of big retailers and fashion brands, as the on-demand car service tries to establish itself as an express delivery option for shoppers on a wide range of shopping websites and apps. Moreover, Uber has also been reportedly in talks with retail tech companies like Bigcommerce and Shopify, which help small businesses set up online storefronts. The news came just 3 weeks after Uber started testing the UberRush courier service to handle package returns.

What Brands Should Do
Clearly, this new program would offer retailers, big and small, a great opportunity to modernize their customer experience with on-demand service. Its potential partnership with Bigcommerce and Shopify could also establish Uber as an aggregator for small local stores in the brick-and-mortar retail space, similar to the way Amazon provides a platform for independent online vendors, and that is something all retail and fashion brands need to be aware.

 

Source: Re/code

Google Debuts App For User-Generated Panoramic Street Views

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has relaunched its old “Photo Sphere Camera” app as a new “Street View” app to further tap into user-generated 360-degree imagery to improve the overall Google Maps experience. The new app will allow users to create panoramic “photo spheres” and share them to Google Map as well as browsing through photo spheres shared by others.

What Brands Should Do
As Google continues to improves its Maps with more brand-friendly, hyperlocal features, brands would be smart to get on board so as to reach the consumers searching on mobile for local inquiries. One way that brands can use this new app, for instance, would be to create virtual tours of their storefronts to appeal to potential customers searching for store locations with an immersive experience.

 

Source: TechCrunch
Header image taken from Google Street View in App Store

Amazon Expands Dash Button Program To Add More Brands

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Now that all prime members can get their own dash buttons, Amazon is expanding the program from 18 brands to include a total of 29 different brands, adding new household names such as Orbit, Smartwater, and L’Oreal. Moreover, the ecommerce giant is also offering credit refund for the first Dash button purchase to incentivize users to try out the physical “one-click buy button”.

What Brands Should Do
With the new expansion, Dash Buttons now cover more than 500 CPG products for Amazon shoppers to purchase with a simple press. As we previously wrote, any brands with a regularly-replenished consumer product would be wise to get on board now and develop their own branded buttons to cultivate a long-term relationship with consumers.

 

Source: 9to5 Toys

Neiman Marcus Adds Visual Search To Its App For Better Discovery

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Luxury department store Neiman Marcus has teamed up with Slyce, a product-discovery platform, to allow users of its retail app to search for items with images instead of texts. Shoppers can either upload a photo from their phone or snap one of a certain product, and Neiman Marcus’ branded app will serve up both the exact item and some similar ones that the retailer carries.

What Brands Should Do
Visual search has long been a great breakthrough point for retail and ecommerce brands seeking to connect their physical and digital assets. A recent example would be Amazon’s great “Firefly” feature on its poorly-received Fire Phone, which promises to identify any object in the real world and facilitate buying through Amazon. For retailers, visual search could lead to better product discovery, boosting sales while also providing customers a better in-store experience.

Source: Digiday

Apple Partners With PayAnywhere To Further Expand Apple Pay

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple has struck a new partnership with PayAnywhere, a POS solution provider that serves more than 300,000 locations around the United States. As part of the partnership, the latest version of the PayAnywhere card reader will also be sold in all Apple Stores.

What Brands Should Do
This new partnership undoubtedly broadens Apple Pay’s reach, which in turn could only help the mass adoption of Apple’s mobile payment. For brands, especially those in retail, this means now is the time to start incorporating your existing reward and loyalty programs into point of sale systems, offering your customer a frictionless shopping experience. To promote Apple Pay usage, PayAnywhere is also offering merchants $5,000 worth of free Apple Pay transaction processing, something that SMBs and independent merchants could take advantage of.

Source: TechCrunch