Perch Interactive boss rounds up Shoptalk talking points

Trevor Sumner, CEO at Perch Interactive, has given his key takeaways from Shoptalk 2018, which took place in Las Vegas earlier this month.

These include rapid experimentation being the key to success, with international moving faster than the US, and Wall Street financing handcuffing retailers and stifling meaningful innovation. In terms of the latter, Sumner writes in a blog post: “We've all seen the stories of store closures and most recently Toys R' Us. What's often under-reported is that what is putting so much strain on retailers and limiting their runway to pivot is the immense amount of debt they have taken on. In good times, greed and "easy" access to money was too tempting for the balance sheet.  Now that the company is under strain and interest rates are going up, there isn't enough margin of error to be able to truly innovate.”

This was best summarised by Joe Jensen, VP General Manager of Retail Solutions Division for Intel who said at Shoptalk: "Retailers know they are on a track that leads to the edge of a cliff, but Wall Street won't let them switch tracks." That's why Nordstrom is so desperate to go private, Sumner argues. “It's their only path to survival.  In a Jason Del Rey interview, Erik Nordstrom talked about how hard it was to manage the e-commerce business that's growing so quickly but not making money while meeting the expectations of Wall Street on the flat but profitable business of in-store. "Have you thought about going private," joked Del Rey. Not as easy as it seems..."

Sumner also flagged up the rise and fall of hype around AR/VR. As Kelly Goetsch, Chief Product Officer of commerceTools wrote in his LinkedIn summary: "While there are a few legitimate use cases for AR/VR, I don't see many. The use cases aren't that compelling, the complexity is too high, people's devices don't have the hardware support, and people don't easily install new apps. Now that AI is peak hype, I think people have moved on." You could definitely see this in the sparse numbers of exhibitors listed in the Shoptalk brochure.”

But bringing digital in-store is still a massive priority, he added. “Brian Cornell of Target discussed the need to embrace change and to offer consumers a more connected physical and digital experience. Great news for Perch, of course. For us, we are emphasising the merging of digital and physical as a platform for scalable delivery of "mixed reality" experiences. It's augmented reality without the need for apps, and thus actually ready to use now. But based on what we are seeing, we may back off that messaging a bit and focus more on scalable platform for digital product experiences in-store.”