mobile payments Archives - People Powered E-Commerce

Mobile-First or Context-First?

The mobile-first approach to marketing was a fantastic idea…at first.

At the turning point of the smartphone era, a new UX strategy needed to be developed to suit what appeared to be the only preferred platform of the customer on-the-go. Working outward from a mobile to desktop interface ensured an identical experience that carried over without sacrificing all the bells and whistles that a desktop platform would boast, and while we celebrate the platform shift, it certainly hasn’t been the best or last development in improving the shopper’s journey.

As uniquely form-fitting as mobile development is for improving users’ access to products that they would otherwise have via desktop, it recreates some of the same problems of desktop-only sites. Mobile first fails to ask why online shoppers are using one device or another, and what they’re looking for in choosing that option. Do they need efficiency, experience and incentives? And how can a platform assist in each of those? Omnichannel retail platforms with mobile, desktop, and brick-and-mortar façades have the potential to adapt their interfaces. The myriad of reasons for why a customer might opt for a mobile over desktop interface or interchange between the devices over the course of their shopping journey are addressed and accounted for in its features.

The case against mobile-first is a matter of meeting the potential that the platform truly offers. It’s no longer enough for retailers to adapt their sites and retail apps to the parameters of a smartphone or tablet screen—they need to contextualize their usage as well. The use of a mobile device is within the context of a user’s immediate needs and trend-proven preferences, and catering to these whims goes beyond simply distinguishing between them to actively striving for an interface that suits each experience. That’s why the next logical step for ease-of-access marketing is a leap from a mobile-first to a context-first approach, which considers the circumstances in which the platform is used, then adapts it to suit that need.

If a millennial is researching product reviews on their smartphone before making a purchase in-store, as over 80% of them reportedly do, their user experience could be improved significantly based on the context of their location.

Should the retailer’s context-first-built mobile app recognize that the buyer is presently at the store, a feature could allow it to forgo all the animations and filler content that usually characterize the app and instead prioritize product reviews in its preview icons and native search engine. Other possible extensions of using context to optimize the online experience have even included suggestions to program retail applications to analyze a device’s battery power and data usage to estimate what context the user is presently in and adapt itself to suit that contextual need best.

While these examples may seem idealistic, they’re not far-fetched technology-wise. They also serve to illustrate just how much a web interface can be optimized by using the context of the customer’s location to streamline their interactions and make their journey from the aisle to check-out counter as breezy as possible.

One of the other many strengths of the context-first approach is that it operates aside from live, time-and-space data monitoring. Context-first also offers all the benefits of the classic marketing technique of demographic targeting, only instead of using dated census-based guidelines such as age or gender, it operates off a concrete set of consumer personas uniquely identified through user interaction and shopping habits.

Let’s say you’re a returning customer at Saks Fifth Avenue. Are you a professional looking to class up your look for a potential promotion, a parent dressing their child in the latest trends, or a fashion enthusiast aiming to shine out in a crowd? How can Saks know which persona you are, and how can they situate their product placement to suit your needs best?

Saks’ secret is that it uses the context-first-built retail tool Salesfloor Storefront™ to customize product recommendations to their clients via the application’s Most Recommended feature. Salesfloor’s Associate Data Cloud uses the data gathered from purchasing, browsing, and other activities from every store in the network to update and selectively suggest relevant products to different shoppers.

Now potential and returning customers of blazers, headbands, and sequin skirts can be readily recommended deals on products that are more relevant to them, such as blouses, strollers, and six-inch heels. The professional, the parent, and the trendsetter now each have a personalized interface where they can browse for curated products at their leisure without having to step over the items that would only interest the other personas.

Another Salesfloor client, Harry Rosen, uses Salesfloor Connect™ to personalize their online customer experience even further by taking advantage of the application’s embedded tool that allows customers to interact and connect with associates based on their location. Not only does this feature increase engagement with the brand, but it also optimizes the customer’s use of their preferred platform by adapting product recommendations to suit their needs best. As for the brand itself, they benefited from up to an average of 50% more service requests by customers after they integrated Connect™ directly within their site pages.

The new customer journey starts with checking out reviews and ends in the checkout line, but all the steps and motives between the two points are unaccounted for in a mobile-first approach.

Mobile first is limited by its simple mirroring of desktop content when it has the potential to be just as complex and nuanced as any one person’s shopping habit. The context-first approach is designed to synch with the in’s and out’s of daily life, the customer’s shopping persona, and the high-quality customer service that they expect when they go to their browsers to interact with a brand.

As more high-end brands secure their clienteling by adopting context-first built applications, retailers that lag behind the trend are apt to miss out on the benefits and sales offered by the industry’s latest innovation.

Where Does the Associate Fit in an Automated World?

We’ve all imagined it- a world where our demands are catered to by computers and robots so that a lot of the daily drudgery is taken care of by someone else. And taking a look at the pace at which things are advancing, it looks like our lives are quickly hurtling towards complete automation.

While it’s interesting to believe that eventually we will be living in a utopia where everything is done for us at the tap of a button, there are major flaws to offloading our lives to computers. Anyone who has accidentally ordered the wrong item online can attest that sometimes automation can be a bigger pain than just getting the correct item in a store.

Associates vs. Automation on Flexibility

The reason ATMs have not made tellers extinct is the same reason that automated kiosks at fast food restaurants are slow to be adopted: people often need to interact with people to solve their problems. Programming and artificial intelligence are great, but you can’t code for every possibility of issue a person might experience. Ever tried to call the 1-800 number for a company and not had any of the number options apply to you? For a sizable portion of the population, this is often the case.

“The reason ATMs have not made tellers extinct is the same reason that automated kiosks at fast food restaurants are slow to be adopted: people often need to interact with people to solve their problems.”

The same holds true for retail. As much as people are fine buying consumables (shampoo, razors, etc) from an online drugstore, there are still people who will never buy a pair of shoes or a jacket without trying it on in store and talking to a sales associate.

Winner: Sales Associates

Associates vs. Automation on Personalization

Consider that while Sephora does a brisk business online, it’s very difficult for someone to find a shade of lipstick that would match a dress they have to wear to a wedding, or for someone to accurately understand whether a moisturizing or smoothing conditioner would work better for them, without speaking to a person who understands the product line. Even if a color swatch for a lipstick is 100% accurate (impossible to do with current technology) then there are the other qualities a lipstick has: texture, weight, matte vs shiny, longevity, whether it has plumping or smoothing ingredients, to consider. 2 minutes with a sales associate and you can have all the answers and make an educated decision on whether that lipstick is right for you.

Consider all the areas in your life where you hold opinions on how something should be, or you have special requirements. Even if you read all the text on a page for a sweater and all the reviews, you still might not know whether 5% Merino Wool will make you itch. 2 minutes in a dressing room will tell you. 5 minutes with a sales associate will give you other options you might not have considered online.

People often view suggestion engines on e-commerce platforms as replacing the role of the Sales Associate in making recommendations, but algorithms are not people. Algorithms don’t know what percentage of “people who bought this item” bought it for uncles or husbands. This is an important distinction that Sales Associates can find out in a very quick discussion.

“Algorithms don’t know what percentage of “people who bought this item” bought it for uncles or husbands.”

Use cases are only some of the reasons that people need and prefer sales associates. Developing relationships with sales associates can help you save money. Good sales associates will tip off valued customers when sales are imminent.

Winner: Sales Associate, with automation as the helpful sidekick

Associates vs. Automation on Social Intelligence

The most important distinction that separates trained sales associates from computers is being able to take in hundreds of pieces of subjective data and turn them into a “sales diagnosis.” Salespeople are able to look at a customer from the time they walk into a store and suss out their style, their mood, and through pleasant interactions, understand the immediate needs of that customer, whether they are buying for themselves, or someone very different from themselves, understand any budget concerns, and suggest items to fit the needs of that customer. This becomes infinitely harder for computers who might be able to identify your face as “you,” but not understand any of these other key pieces of data, or judge your mood.

A surprising amount of subjectivity goes into the shopping experience. People are better educated consumers- meaning they understand the average price for goods, common feature sets, what to look for in a quality item, etc. but many customers still go into shopping for gifts or major items a bit bewildered. They often have lots of questions. If you’ve ever used a “frequently asked questions” page on a website, you understand the limitations. No algorithm will be able to tell you how easy to clean one fridge is versus another one, where a Sales Associate will have the answer to this, and also ask follow up questions about product suitability if that question leads them to believe the person asking the question has children. One fridge might be safer than another for little fingers or have the water dispenser in a less accessible place. No algorithm can take these pieces of data into proper consideration and deliver a suggestion the same way.

“If you’ve ever used a “frequently asked questions” page on a website, you understand the limitations (of automation).”

Sales Associates are also the keepers of secret information that they can use to help customers. If there is a problem with a product, Sales Associates often know the best way to get in touch with manufacturers, where to have products serviced, or altered, and often can tell you before purchase if an item being sold is “white labeled” by another company. (Something even consumer reviews can’t tell you, but could be critical in the event of a product recall or a malfunction.) Secret knowledge holds great value and power for consumers, and there is no easy way to get this information online.

Computers can store a lot more information than humans and access it incredibly quickly, but they don’t pick up social cues.

Winner: Sales Associate, with automation as the helpful sidekick

Best of Both Worlds

So where does the associate fit in an automated world? At the helm. Beginning now, and expanding in the future, sales associates will be able to leverage the best parts of big data and artificial intelligence coupled with their tried and true methods of customer care.

Sales teams will be able to share secret knowledge and customer insights. They will be able to flag questions that often arise from customers to help their fellow associates more effectively learn and pass on product knowledge. They will be able to proactively communicate with valued customers to alert them of private events, and sales on specific items they’ve expressed interest in, thus raising the purchase cadence of these valued customers. They will be able to record important events in a customer’s life- birthdays, anniversaries, etc. and prepare proactive communications to entice a customer to come in to shop for that event.

Data on its own can sometimes be seen as an intrusion, but data coupled with a friendly face and a confident Sales Associate can help close deals. For many customers, the less they need to think about or disclose about their needs, the more they appreciate the service.

Service industries will always be with us, and sales associates are a vitally important part of the retail ecosystem. Imagine buying a car or a house without speaking to a person. Customers have needs that technology won’t be able to meet in the same way that a person can. Humans can leverage the best parts of technology to deliver the best solution for customers in ways that anticipate and serve the needs of customers in new and exciting ways.

To Increase Spending, Reduce Friction for your Customers

How can all retailers learn from Amazon Go’s recent experiments?

Remember the first time you watched Star Trek and saw items magically appear in the replicator on demand? The advent of mobile shopping, in-home on demand buttons, and on demand replenishment services is making that science fiction become more of a reality.

[Star Trek Replicator image via: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Replicator]

What’s interesting is that as much as we imagined having unprecedented purchasing power at the tips of our fingers would change our lives, we perhaps didn’t bargain on how it might change our brains and behavior.

Frictionless purchasing is great for situations when customers need something as soon as possible and don’t have a lot of time to spend. Where it causes some concern is a situation comedian Patton Oswalt has summarized “I’ve been drunk enough to order stamps online.” When people lose the friction and barriers to shopping, sometimes they make purchases inadvertently or ones they may regret.

How does frictionless purchasing actually affect human brains? It’s obviously a new field of research, but the parts of the brain that form the reward centre are at work.

Back in 1998, Neuroeconomists at MIT discovered that credit cards, while convenient, did not connect purchasers enough to their purchases the way even debit cards do. This makes it easy to make the purchase in the moment, but not as welcome when it comes time to pay the bill. If something as manual as pulling out one card over another can have such a strong effect on our brains, what can pushing a button, touching a phone to a touchpad or even using a fingerprint do to the experience?

Something MIT has figured out more recently is that frictionless payments not only make people more likely to purchase impulsively, they are more likely to get them to pay more per purchase.

Of course, this is good news for retailers who are looking for lower cost methods to increase cart size. It’s also good news for businesses that are losing a percentage of sales to online outlets… It turns out if you make the experience as easy as possible at point of sale, you can reap the rewards.

If you make the experience as easy as possible at point of sale, you can reap the rewards.

That’s the basic thinking Amazon is running with with their new concept store, Amazon Go. Customers tap their phones on the turnstile when entering and leaving the store the way you might for a subway trip. Everything they pick up in the store is added to their cart and then they simply leave and are charged for the total order.

For convenience based businesses, this could be a new trend. It cuts down on overhead, reduces shrink, updates inventory in real-time and gives deep analytics to a retailer about what people are purchasing and when (consider that this data can be cross-referenced with weather, for instance, to discover that more cookies are sold on rainy days.)

Amazon was right to start this experiment with a grocery store. It’s hard to imagine another retail endeavor with such ripe potential for impulse purchasing. For those with carts, your only limit is your cart. For those with baskets, your only limit is what you can carry. We’ll have to watch to see what the results are of this experiment, but the science tells us this will lead to increased purchase frequency and larger cart size.

An interesting recent change in purchasing is the increase in tips caused by adding tip “buttons” to POS terminals in restaurants. When presented with tip percentage options, people often choose a higher tip percentage than if they had paid cash. There is an interesting bit of cognitive science here. The buttons play on three things – the suppression of friction makes it easier to spend more without consideration, the options indicate to us that perhaps others tip more than we might, and that can create a competition reflex, and we simply have a preference for round numbers. This leads to happier waiters, and much happier restaurateurs as a result.

When presented with tip percentage options (in POS terminals), people often choose a higher tip percentage than if they had paid cash.

How can retailers harness the power of frictionless purchasing? Getting your company fully up and running with a completely frictionless payment system can be expensive and may result in downtime or lost sales, so it’s not always easily done.

If you’re not in the position to switch to a new system, consider adding options. Square is one of many companies offering simple payments that only require a phone or an iPad to work. These systems often add payment options like Paypal, which aren’t available easy elsewhere.

Another option for retailers that seems to be working is the hybrid of buying online and picking up in-store. This way, you’re capitalizing on people who are incorporating shopping with you into their normal routine. If you can make this frictionless, so they can grab and go, you could see lift in your sales and cart size. Salesfloor has a ‘reserve in store” feature coming in 2017. For now, purchases can be made online and shipped to the customer’s home. Stay tuned!

If your business is primarily online, you can consider testing options for your cart procedure. Amazon’s 1-click purchasing is popular for the simple reason that users can shop and go as long as their details are up-to-date.

Looking at the science on the tip button, there are some interesting ideas for e-commerce retailers. Suggesting items that would fill a cart for free shipping or entitle a customer to a perk is an easy, frictionless way of increasing cart sizes. Salesfloor associates can offer these types of perks through a marketing campaign to their clients or more generally, by simply engaging with customers as they shop online.

Not every method of making purchasing frictionless comes down to technology.

Not every method of making purchasing frictionless comes down to technology. Businesses can look to companies like Apple and Sephora for guidance on what the future of payment might look like: having terminals in hand throughout the store, on demand, allowing customers to walk up to a sales associate, skipping big lineups. After the transaction, the customer just walks out. Receipts are sent to their desired email, so they can retrieve them as needed.

The psychology of shopping is an emerging and rapidly changing area of study, but some basic human behaviors remain consistent, which makes it easier for retailers to make small, educated tests of their markets to see whether these tests result in larger carts and higher purchase frequency. We think that retailers who make this leap will have their choice of consumers ready to spend some serious money.

Ways to Motivate Your Customers to Buy (beyond price)

Customers are motivated by vastly different things. Don’t make yours motivated by price.

If you had to describe recent decades as macro shopping patterns, it would have to be that the 1980s were about status, the 1990s were about price and the rise of the all-in box store, the 2000s were all about conspicuous spending, but where does that leave the 2010s?

It’s interesting that in an era where things we need are costing more than ever before, the main motivator for shoppers does not always seem to be price. In a world where you can spend 30 minutes in your pajamas to find the lowest price on an iPad, people still spend hours in the Apple store, just browsing and trying out the shiny new things. What exactly is going on there?

The 2000s saw the rise of ecommerce and its effects on bricks and mortar- it had a polarizing effect. Some businesses thrived. Others were the victims of showrooming. Some people still prefer to do all their shopping in person. A quick check of any mall parking lot in December confirms this. People are shopping in store, and sometimes paying a premium to do so.

What seems to set retailers apart in this new paradigm are retailers who understand their role in customer care, and that customer care starts the moment the door opens. According to an Oxford study in 2013, what customers really care about isn’t decoration or cheerily delivered sales scripts, it’s a salesperson’s ability to read a customer’s mood and deliver what’s needed to them in the moment. Understanding when a customer is in a hurry or buying a gift for someone who is unwell is a key part of sales success, according to the study’s findings. The same study found that women are actually distrustful of red “sale” signs, and often second guess whether they are being manipulated.

What customers really care about isn’t decoration or cheerily delivered sales scripts, it’s a salesperson’s ability to read a customer’s mood and deliver what’s needed to them in the moment.

Psychology today looked at the psychographic profiles of different types of shoppers and found they are motivated by sometimes wildly different reasons to shop: adventure, social outings, indulgence, trends, relationship to a recipient were all cited as strong motivating factors toward driving purchases.

[In other words, focus on the other shopping types!]

Bargain shopping was not only a lower motivator, if you look at it versus all the other reasons, It’s only 1/6th of the reasons to complete a purchase, and has no emotion tied to it. Competing on price doesn’t make the most sense from a numbers perspective as a strategy. Catering to more of these identified motivations seems to be a way forward for retailers in a changing environment.

What’s Working in Retail Right Now

Who’s winning the retail game? Think small. Small as in brands, and small as in square feet. Many large retail operations are moving into smaller, more urban focused spaces and catering to the needs of urban dwellers. This is partly due to the cost of operating in these markets versus the amount of foot traffic moving to e-commerce solutions. Stores simply don’t need to be as big anymore. How do stores win in that case?

Studies show that customers will walk around and browse more in a smaller location. The more you browse, the more opportunities for you to find something you’re going to purchase, and the larger your bill might be. Smaller stores also bring you in contact with sales staff more, enabling more touches and more opportunities to get questions answered.

The think small ethos has also worked to bring big attention and a healthy bottom line to retailers like Warby Parker. They’ve managed to successfully bridge the offline-online gap in a vertical that most would agree requires in-store shopping: eyewear. It turns out, that they’ve managed to do what traditional retail wisdom tells us is impossible: Take a primarily online business and segue it into retail success. They boast nearly 50 stores in the United States and Canada. (Up from 0 in 2010.) Their “try at home” program still exists, but foot traffic at their stores is healthy.

[Warby Parker photo from Flickr: https://flic.kr/p/b9Hitz]

What’s Working in E-commerce Right Now

Customization was a theme about 7 years ago we were promised would win big in the future. While it has had some moderate success for some retailers, it’s largely not been a real vertical killer for brands who have tried. More options means more overhead in the form of inventory you may never move and can’t repurpose. It turns out, customers don’t want custom products, they want custom curation.

It turns out, customers don’t want custom products, they want custom curation.

What’s been working for many retailers is an old fashioned idea: Newsletters. 2016 was, for retailers and media companies alike the Year of the Newsletter.

Email is still king when it comes to driving sales. Search barely beats it out, but that’s for consumers who already know what they want. For those who are “just browsing” or undecided, Email is the best bang for a marketing buck.

The ability to tailor content to a specific customer based on shopping preferences, time of year, and purchase history has changed the game for many retailers. Our own partners have seen real foot traffic and conversions from implementing Salesfloor to personalize the shopping experience for individuals.

Associates using the Salesfloor platform can create personalized email marketing campaigns in which they can offer special promotions or recommendations. Presenting the right goods to the right customer at the right time leads to sales lift, much like hand selling in store by judging a customer’s mood and style works.

The Road Ahead

No one has a crystal ball to know what’s next for retail, but what works- Observing, Listening to and Responding to customers is not a purely offline or online play. These are cornerstones for selling and increasing cart sizes. We predict that a mixture of human interactions, data, and real customer feedback will further refine the way products are sold in 2017 and tech will be a key part of lowering friction to purchase, increasing purchase frequency, and increasing purchase sizes for retailers.

Observing, Listening to and Responding to customers is not a purely offline or online play.

We’re thrilled to work with our partners to watch this transformation of retail happen in real time and are excited for what’s next.

7 Trends That Will Continue to Impact Retail in 2017

2016 has been one interesting year (to say the least). We’ve lost too many of our classic rock icons, we had one of the most divisive political races in history, and we found out that the UK will be leaving the European Union. We’ve talked to many people who are ready to move into 2017 with an eye to a hopeful future, and we are, too.

With that eye on the hopeful future, we’ve taken a look at seven hot trends that have really taken off in 2016 that we predict will make an even bigger impact on retail in 2017.

1. “On demand” Shopping

Though Google’s Project Wing partnership with Starbucks – along with the promise of drone-delivered lattés – has recently been shelved, the inevitability of drones delivering goods to our doorstep at a click of a button isn’t too far off into the future. Ever since Amazon released the test drone delivery footage in 2013, we’ve been anticipating the day we would see our packages flying through the skyline. And just recently, the Federal Aviation Authority gave Amazon the ok to proceed with the service.

Though a few retailers already provide same day delivery and pickup in-store, it won’t be long into the future before it’s expected that your customers will be able to get their purchases within hours of their purchase.

via GIPHY

2. The Internet of Things

Not one, but two different ‘internet fridges’ were offered to the buying public this year that turn your ice box into a smart food centre that allows you to do things like order groceries and browse recipes. Google is monitoring our homes with Nest, Amazon’s Alexa is our home voice-activated personal assistant who will do everything from playing music to suit our mood to ordering toilet paper and beyond.

What’s next? Will our vanities order expired cosmetics? Will our Apple Watches remind us when we are walking by the mall that it is our mother-in-law’s birthday coming up? Will our shoes send a message to our personal shopper that it’s time for a new pair because they’ve worn out?

You may think this is far fetched, but at the pace of technology, it’s not that far off into the future. As everything in our physical world gets connected to the web, more and more opportunities for retailers arise. Have you imagined how your business will take advantage of this?

[credit: http://theverynearfuture.com/post/137280998764/smart-fridge-what-is-this-comic-about-samsung]

3. Personalization

It’s not new or news that customers want to feel like they are more than just a number. For a long time, personalization has been key to improving the experience for the customer as well as increasing sales for the retailer.

There is nothing like coming into your favorite business and being greeted by someone who not only remembers you from your last visit, but can also show you directly to the new products based on their memory of your previous purchases. It saves you time and makes you feel special. It also influences your purchase. According to our recent study, 73 percent of shoppers say sales associates who remember their personal preferences/style impact how much they buy from a retailer.

But it isn’t only in-store where personalization can make a difference, you have the opportunity to do more than just recommend products through algorithm. Tools like Salesfloor allow you to give the same level of personalization online that you give offline. This isn’t a trend that is going to go away. As more and competition appears, personalization is going to become even more important.

4. Virtual and Augmented Reality

Have you ever looked at a chair or table in a showroom and tried to envision how it would look and fit in your house? We have. Back in the day of catalogues, we even cut them out and stood holding the clipping out in front of us to get a better sense. Thankfully as Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) have evolved over time, we no longer have to carefully cut out pictures, we can just hold our smartphones up to the room, place the furniture piece and -voila!- we can see how it will fit in its surroundings.

For those who don’t know the distinction, Virtual Reality (VR) is the technology that immerses the user into a simulated world, and Augmented Reality (AR) is technology that brings simulated elements into the real world.

In regards to VR, you have probably seen the goggles such as the Oculus Rift, where the person wearing them escapes to a 360 degree fantasy world. Though virtual reality is mostly used in gaming, we are seeing travel companies use it to create simulations of escapes, realtors use it for virtual tours of homes for sale, and car companies use it for virtual test drives. HBR.org gives the example of being able to test a tent remotely.

AR has been around for many years (Converse used it in 2010), however, the rise of Pokemon Go this year has not only brought it into the mainstream, it’s ignited the public’s desire for more applications of the technology. AR is especially attractive because it’s so simple: anyone with a smartphone can use it. To our example above around furniture, Wayfair, online home goods and furniture marketplace, launched Wayfair View to help customers visualize furniture in their homes (though Ikea did this back in 2013).

[credit: http://gph.is/2bFPCMq created from Lee Jeans ad]

5. Direct to Consumer

Direct to consumer fashion brands have been popping up all over for many years now, but according to Racked, many established designers and brands are also pulling their lines out of department stores and creating their own direct to consumer online and offline boutiques. This move is accelerating now because of several factors:

Number one, designers and brands have grown more direct relationships with their customers through social media. Number two, creating online stores is easier than ever and since more and more customers are shopping online, this has created a great revenue source to help fund (number three) the brick and mortar experience.

Though this could prove tricky for some department stores, others like Saks Fifth Avenue have embraced the idea of the direct to consumer model, creating shop-in-shops that allow for their brands to create unique branding experiences while enjoying access to the Saks clientele.

[credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/12241789/]

6. Mobile Payments

Currently, there are only a handful major retailers that offer mobile payments: the Apple Store, Home Depot, Starbucks, Macy’s, Walgreens, Bloomingdales, etc. But we know that this is going to grow a lot in the next few years because of the number of options consumers now have available. According to TechCrunch:

A recent report noted that 39 percent of all mobile users in the U.S. had made a mobile payment in 2015. This is up from 14 percent in 2014 and by my estimations will in the 70 percent range by 2017.

There are three overarching categories of mobile payments:

Near Field Communications (NFC), which you’ll find in Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay, allowing the customer to just tap their phone to a device and authorize the transaction.
Commerce payments, where customers use an app with a stored credit card. Anyone who has checked themselves out at the Apple Store or used the Starbucks App have experienced this.
Mobile Wallets, where customers can store their cards on their phone to scan.

If you haven’t considered offering mobile payments as an option to your customers, it’s probably a good New Year’s resolution to make.

[credit: http://themerkle.com/shake-giving-android-apple-pay-run-for-money/]

7. Enhanced Experiences

As we wrote in our article on the retail renaissance, the retailers who are driving the most profit per square foot in their stores are those who are prioritizing experience over sales. Though it seems like a contradiction to get more sales from de-prioritizing sales, this is what appears to be a factor contributing to the enormous brick and mortar profits of retailers like Apple, Shinola, and Warby Parker, and more established retailers and department stores are taking note.

Bed, Bath and Beyond just announced that they are adding a cafe in their stores and have even applied for a liquor licence. Saks at Brookfield Place in New York offers up an experience they call a Power Lunch, which gives you a beauty treatment, style consultation and lunch – no purchase required. Harry Rosen partnered with Macallan Whisky to create a tasting bar in store.

The more excuses you can give your customers to just ‘drop in and hang out’ with no pressure to buy, the more likely they will buy. And the more often they have these experiences, the more they will start to get used to them. 2017 and beyond we are sure to see a rise in enhanced experiences in retail.

[Credit: Guru Blog covering the Barbershop in Frank & Oak’s Montreal retail location]

When it comes to trends, 2017 looks a lot like the next iteration of 2016, which will make things even more exciting for retailers and customers. Now, here’s hoping the trends outside of the retail world don’t continue along the same path as 2016. Have a happy holiday and a prosperous new year!