Personalized service was one of the casualties when the retail industry moved from independent stores to chains. Personalization at scale has always been difficult, but technology advances in the last ten years have helped. Which of the three C’s for personalization described in the article will be most challenging for physical stores to deliver?
Once again proving that Amazon is a technology company that happens to do commerce, the Seattle giant has released Amazon Dash, a new tool for shoppers, complementing their Fresh program, which is only available in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. What do you think about Amazon Dash and the overall opportunity around scan/voice grocery list compilers?
Since the early 1990s, technology has enabled great leaps forward for e-commerce sites while the brick-and-mortar world has remained relatively stagnant. By-and-large the web world retains a big advantage. Will mobile phone tracking capabilities help brick & mortar stores even the playing field with online selling around context awareness?
Will the EMV (Europay/Mastercard/Visa) standard protect retailers? About as well as PCI certification does today, says BrainTrust panelist David Dorf, who worked with the EMV developing software for smartcards. Do you expect the arrival of EMV to do much to stop data breaches? What steps will likely have to be further taken to protect retailers from fraud?
So you’re a retailer and you want to plant the seeds of innovation at your company. Where do you get started? We have five suggestions. What should retailers do to encourage innovation within their organization and supplier companies? What do you see as the biggest sources of inspiration as well as barriers for retailers?
Perhaps instead of asking what will be different ten years from now, maybe we should ask what won’t change? That’s one approach Jeff Bezos takes when deciding where to focus energies. What strategies should guide technology investments in today’s rapidly-changing climate?
A new iPhone app called Pounce augments the newspaper experience by allowing users to point their mobile phone’s camera at an item in the circular and have it added to a basket. How receptive do you think shoppers will be to using newspaper circulars to support their e-commerce purchases?
An alternative approach for home delivery is to forgo the warehouses and trucks and leverage what’s already available in every town. Instacart takes a crowdsourcing approach to grocery home delivery. What do you see as the pos and cons of a crowdsourced delivery service?
One of the things innovation teams try to do is “fail fast,” to arrive at a failure or success assessment quickly to minimize investments in failures. But just because a project isn’t deemed a success doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a failure. What is your evaluation of the varied approaches retailers are taking to establishing innovation labs?
The use of a second screen opens interesting possibilities in the advertising world. From an overt perspective, advertisers need to figure out how to connect their TV commercials to the Web better. How do you see the merging of TV viewing and the e-commerce reshaping advertising and retail sales?
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