If you have not been living in a cave for some years, you must have known how the connected and internet-ready gadgets and devices collectively called as Internet of Things (IoT) is expanding across all spheres of our lives. As the vast majority of businesses are gearing to adopt IoT within a year or two, this is the time to inquire about the role of IoT in shaping consumer behavior and the way they shop, transact and make buying decisions.
It is more or less true that the future of growth in the retail sector will be mainly pushed by the innovative measures backed by the latest technologies. Retail chain brands and eCommerce app developers know that among the latest wave of new technologies that are paving the way for new innovations, IoT is at the forefront. Presumably, IOT will shape consumer interactions and behavior in the years to come. Besides the regular retail experience across physical stores equipped with connected gadgets and sensors, the eCommerce shopping experience will also go through a tremendous makeover thanks to the IoT ecosystem of connected devices.
Personalized Shopping Experience
The biggest influence of modern technologies in retail and eCommerce is clearly visible through the way they are paving the way for a personalized shopping experience. Actually, personalized shopping has been a big push factor for retail growth as well because consumers these days like brands that allow them more ways to express their choices and personality traits.
Personalized shopping is paving the way for business growth in the retail sector, whether for online stores or for regular consumer shops and stores. IoT devices are allowing retailers to collect huge volume of customer data that can be analyzed to draw valuable insights about their buying intents and preferences. Based upon these insights retailers now can make product recommendations and help customers to make choices. This also helps brands to make specific discounts and offers for consumers in a personalized manner.
Fast-paced and Automated Checkout
We all have a good impression about a store that allows us to shop and checkout on our own without any hassle of queuing up and making products checked and billed. This is why self-checkout without the billing process has become so popular in supermarkets and modern retail stores.
Many major retail stores and supermarkets like Walmart, Home Depot and others are already allowing us such a fast-paced checkout process. This is primarily becoming possible because of the IoT gadgets and connected sensors that can read the RFID rags and product labels when customers are still shopping inside the store. Automated checkout without any billing process will ultimately make the shopping experience better and IoT devices and sensors will play a major role in this.
Inventory and warehouse management
Thanks to IoT and it’s connected ecosystem of gadgets and sensors, keeping track of inventory became easier than ever before. Connected sensors and the RFID tags together allow real-time inventory management with the streamlined flow of data. This besides helping monitoring and tracking of the items also helps in reducing the human errors and make the process more streamlined and efficient. With the use of smart shelves with sensors that can track the movement of goods in real-time, maintenance of the stock becomes easier. This helps keep the customer dissatisfaction at bay while improving the bottom line by reducing cost.
IoT apart from optimizing and boosting inventory and stock management also plays a great role in managing warehouses for retail business brands. This is particularly useful for several business niches like the food and pharmaceutical industries that constantly require keeping the temperature at a low level for keeping the products in consumable condition. By using the temperature-monitoring sensors the temperature can be kept at the ideal level for many warehouse storages and thus any damage of items can be avoided.
Some retail giants like Amazon have gone steps ahead and are already using connected smart robots that can monitor the packing of goods and their pickup prices. No wonder, Such IoT backend processes will only boost efficiency and qualitative output in the retail sector.
Background Upgrades
If you think all the impacts of IoT is just about sending customers timely notifications backed by location data captured with beacon sensors, you are terribly wrong. In fact, more than the impact of IoT for customers at the forefront, IOT is impacting more on the background business management of retail brands. Since RFID chips and reading sensors have now become affordable to all shoppers irrespective of the business size and brand value, streamlining the business process has become easier than ever before. This is actually reducing the manpower cost for many retailers and eCommerce brands.
If beacons help the retail brands to market retail products to customers in a location sensible manner, there are also other ways that such maneuvers and hi-tech implementations to help background tasks and operations. For example, on-road vehicle sensors are revolutionizing the supply chain and logistics management tasks for many retail brands. This is also helping the retail brands to enhance prices efficiency with real-time traffic updates and more precision-driven delivery timing.
Tracking delivery has been one of the key areas where the IoT ecosystem played a major influential role. Precision in delivery tracking and minimizing human errors, deviations and delays are the great outcomes of the IoT backed the delivery process. Moreover, all the data collected from real-time tracking of shipment and goods delivery can further help a retail brand optimize its delivery process by minimizing the errors.
Conclusion
The power of IoT and the connected ecosystem of software applications and devices will only play a bigger role in retail and eCommerce stores in the years to come. The above-mentioned examples only showcase the valid logic behind such development.
Author Bio
Nathan McKinley is a Business Development Manager at Cerdonis Technologies LLC – mobile app development company in Chicago, USA developing IoT apps and software for better accessibility of the physical devices to the internet. After spending years in Marketing Field as a Business Developer for the tech market where he has done several pieces of research on tech updates which are now he is sharing threw his writing skills.
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