Smartphones today have evolved to be an important part of our daily lives more than ever before and it’s been more than a decade that consumers are engaged in e-commerce. With these smartphones, today consumers are completely going digital and are more in control of information related to their consumption and purchases. To be able to understand the consumers more closely, retailers will need a sneak peek into the shopping behaviors of the individual customers. This can help the retailers to take actions at the appropriate place, time and situation in which the customers shopping journey occurs. This data can be generated from the beacons, sensors or the smartphones used by the customers while shopping.
To get a better insight into this, Cisco undertook a study with 1,240 consumers from the United States and the United Kingdom. This research is a part of a global study of 6000 respondents across 10 countries which will be released in the first half of 2015. According to the study, Internet of Things is on the rise in the retail industry with $14.4 trillion in value for the private sector, $1.5 trillion is of retailers. Internet of Things is basically a network connection between people, process, data, and things.
Cisco study reveals that this connection will rise from 13 billion today to 50 billion by the end of the decade. The total value at stake will be as high as $19 trillion from 2013 to 2022.
The nature of shopping is changing in the industry and to understand this it’s necessary to examine the shopping pattern of the customers which has evolved from the pre-Amazon.com era through multi-channel e-commerce and now to the IoE era. Earlier shopper’s interactions while shopping journey added to three, with the entry of e-commerce this number expanded to 40. Now, Internet of Everything promises more than 800 unique variations of shopping journeys.
To measure the extent of the app usage, consider that in 2012, 1.2 billion people were using mobile apps, the number is expected to rise to 4.4 billion by 2017. More than 1/3rd of the U.S shoppers and 1/4th U.K shoppers use mobile shopping apps at least once a week. More than 50% of the shoppers use retailer-specific apps at least once per week.
Hyper-relevance is a term where retailers increase the value of the customers throughout their shopping journey, providing them a combination of saving, efficiency, and engagement. And according to Cisco’s research, this is key to the future of shopping.
