Where Retail Technology Needs To Go Now

There are a lot of ideas around about where retail technology needs go and most of them are good. But until now, very few of them were going to do what retailers need most: give consumers a great reason to go back into stores. Now, there are ideas emerging and developing that will be highly impactful. These new ideas and software will affect almost every in-store experience in the future, they will change what it means to go to a store and they will make store experiences more worthwhile than ever. Before we get to that, let’s take a quick sidebar to understand what technology isn’t. Technology is never going to be the point of most retail stores. The most important thing will always be the products and services offered for sale in the store. Technology can facilitate the connection between the product and the consumer and I don’t mean to minimize that, a retailer’s mission fails if that connection isn’t made. But the main event is always going to be whether the consumer and the product are right for each other. Technology can help a lot but some retailers who are focusing on technology as the answer to everything are missing the point. Technology is a tool. Now back to our subject. The next step in retail technology is informed by what’s been learned from e-commerce. Read more at Forbes.