Trends

For Retail, By Retail: 3 Characteristics That Highlight the Importance of Technology Built for Retail

By Scott Duby, True Fit

Today’s post is a contribution from a guest author, Scott Duby, General Manager Partnerships & Alliances at True Fit

Phygital vs. BOPIS, card file vs. card on file, shrinkage, tribetailing – while these are colloquialisms for retailers, this jargon is confusing and likely to be misused by anyone unfamiliar with the retail industry. 

And jargon like this is only one of many examples of what makes retail so unique. Since the dawn of retail, the industry has cultivated its own culture, with different ways of listening, thinking, operating and communicating. 

Taken together, all of these differences make retail an industry that operates unlike any other. As a result, retailers need technology solutions that natively understand these nuances to succeed in today’s competitive environment. 

The Shift to Digital Has Heightened the Need for Technology Built for Retail

Most recently, we’ve seen retail undergo digital transformations at warp speed, as leaders report implementing two years worth of digital initiatives within two months. This growing reliance on technology and rapid innovation in digital makes introducing technology built for retail significantly more important. 

Against this backdrop, it’s essential for marketers to understand that the best technology investments are not built to support a number of industries, retail being one of them, but rather built specifically for the retail industry.

Retailers Do Things Differently — So Should Their Technology

To optimize digital expansion strategies and continue to elevate the brand experience — especially in the face of today’s rapid shift to digital — retailers must invest in tech stacks and platforms that were purpose-built to support three of the most defining characteristics of retail. 

1) Unique Objectives 

Consider profitability within the industry. The goal of profitability may be the same as other verticals, but the strategies retailers use to achieve this goal are unique. Increasing conversions, growing a shopper’s lifetime value, considering repeat visits and order rates, reducing returns – these objectives are all unique to retail. 

Retail-specific technology recognizes these differences and is purpose-built to drive results and facilitate growth in key areas. For example, fashion retail-specific technologies can:

2) Complex Customer Engagements

Engagement with customers happens across more channels in retail than it does in any other industry, and no two organizations look alike. Prior to COVID-19, retailers saw 20-30% of sales come from ecommerce, and many are seeing shifts well above 50% due to behavior changes during the pandemic. One all-American brand with which True Fit works is seeing 70% of their traffic from mobile; others are seeing unprecedented surges in orders from social. 

The complexities, inconsistencies and multichannel approaches within the industry are another reason that technology must be retail-specific. Technology made for retail should generate a seamless experience for shoppers to connect with brands across any and all ecommerce channels.

For instance, brands can use data from True Fit’s Fashion Genome, the retail industry’s largest dataset, to power personalized customer experiences through fit and style recommendations. The Genome maps personal fit and style preference data from 200 million registered users to normalized size data from 17,000 brands, product details from millions of pieces of clothing and shoes and over $170 billion in transaction data to offer personalized recommendations. Then, by connecting the vast dataset to Bluecore’s personalized marketing technology, retailers can personalize marketing campaigns to include the best items for individual shoppers, which drives more engaged traffic to ecommerce channels or even physical stores. By connecting both of these initiatives to Google Cloud, retailers can gain the necessary flexibility to scale these types of experiences quickly based on sudden shifts in customer demands and external factors.

Technology built for multiple industries cannot begin to understand the requirements to support the retail industry. Only retail-specific technology can open up and connect these complexities to create opportunity for growth.

3) Speed to Execute and Innovate

Speed is perhaps one of the most talked about key performance indicators in retail – fast fashion is even its own segment. Retailers are applauded for speedy supply chains, fast experience execution and fast growth. But technology cannot adequately support the “speed of retail” – not to mention the complexities and the uniqueness of the industry – if it was not designed for retail from the start. 

The technologies brands use must be built with the speed of retail in mind. Speed is not only a competitive advantage for many brands, but on the flip side of that, ecommerce latency is detrimental to the customer experience. 

As Forbes contributor Greg Petro puts it: “Right now, speed is the key differentiator [in retail] and real-time consumer data is critical. It’s like air.” In short, in an environment that is intentionally always changing, it is critical that technologies can help retailers adapt and improve as quickly as possible.

Introducing Technology Built for the Uniqueness, Complexity and Speed of Retail

The value of technology built for retail is indisputable. The industry is unique and needs industry-specific support and capabilities to enable more nuanced objectives. Retail is also highly complex and requires technology that supports and simplifies its processes, channels and analysis. Finally, the speed at which retail moves – especially now during the pandemic – is a factor that will make or break a retailer and brands can’t afford any slow-downs due to technology. 

The best technology investments for brands should tackle all three components with ease in order to ensure success and long-term growth. Technologies built for retail, perhaps even by those who have spent time in the space and understand its culture, are key to driving that success. 

To learn more about best practices when building your retail marketing technology stack, download this guide from Bluecore, Google Cloud and True Fit

Scott Duby, True Fit

Scott Duby is True Fit’s General Manager Partnerships & Alliances. Prior to True Fit, he served as IBM’s Director of Global Consumer Industry, where he was responsible for emerging opportunities and strategic initiatives, partnerships and alliances and mergers and acquisitions. Scott has over 20 years experience working with leading retail and consumer products companies as a merchant, industry analyst and management consulting.