Last week’s biggest retail technology deals at a glance
RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, deployments and pilots from the past seven days. Featuring Marks and Spencer, Amazon, Flying Tiger Copenhagen, Finish Line, and Decathlon UK.
M&S has launched a live shopping series on its website.
The service, facilitated by the retailer’s software partner LiSA, allows customers to join a live broadcast hosted by an M&S expert where they can hear more about the ranges they’re browsing, ask questions through a live chat function, view product demonstrations, and buy products as they watch.
Premier league football club Tottenham Hotspur has selected BigCommerce’s platform to improve its online store and drive its expansion into international markets.
“BigCommerce’s leading open SaaS approach was a deciding factor for us,” says Duncan Pass, Head of Retail at Tottenham Hotspur.
“Their flexible e-commerce platform combined with their curated ecosystem of integration partners create endless opportunities for us to modernise our online store, offer amazing features for our fans and support our continued growth throughout the world.”
Savage X Fenty, a lingerie brand founded by singer Rihanna, has launched its first physical storefront in Las Vegas.
This features Fit:Match technology. Using an app, customers can receive a body scan with augmented reality that creates a 3D avatar similar to their body type. They then get product recommendations based on their size and shape.
The brand plans to open additional stores in Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia and the D.C. area in early 2022.
Amazon is prepping a new Amazon Go convenience store format aimed at suburban shoppers and powered by the e-commerce giant’s Just Walk Out frictionless checkout technology.
The first of these locations, which will offer grab and go foods, beverages and everyday essentials, is set to open in the near future in the Seattle suburb of Mill Creek, Washington.
Amazon will then target the Los Angeles region.
The new stores will line up alongside Amazon's existing fleet of smaller, urban focused Go outlets.
UK-based omnichannel tool and building supply retailer, Toolstation, has appointed Percona to manage its MySQL databases and strengthen the core of its business critical applications.
Toolstation uses MySQL as part of its critical stock management, extranet, e-commerce and web applications, with the European e-commerce environment currently hosted on-premises and the remainder on Google Cloud.
Geek+, a specialist in AI robotics technology, and sporting goods retailer Decathlon have announced the deployment of hundreds of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in three of the latter’s European distribution centres.
The DCs, located in Castelnau, France, Łódź, Poland, and Campania, Italy, are leveraging Geek+’s AMR technology to enable Decathlon to increase its storage capacity, streamline its logistics processes, and better serve its expanding online customer base across those countries.
Finish Line is to deploy Aptos solutions in a bid to optimise merchandising strategies across its retail enterprise and obtain actionable insights for its end-to-end merchandising activities.
San Francisco-based Cartken’s Model C robots have been chosen by Mitsubishi Electric for a pilot project at AEON MALL Tokoname, Japan.
Beginning this month, the latter will oversee a pilot where customers can use the Starbucks app to select their food and beverage order. A Cartken robot will meet the customer at one of the delivery points inside or outside the mall.
Mitsubishi Electric is also looking at other use cases.
Flying Tiger Copenhagen is rolling out MishiPay’s mobile self-checkout solution to its UK stores.
This follows a trial across stores in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
The Scan, Pay & Go technology was deployed across 30 stores in the Nordic region, enabling customers to scan and pay for items in-store without having to queue or download an app.
By scanning a QR code with their smartphone, people could access MishiPay on their phone’s browser, scan product barcodes and pay with the tap of a button, while in-store staff could view purchase activity and analytics in real-time.
A2Z Smart Technologies Corp. has introduced its Cust2Mate smart cart platform in the US and Israel.
Cust2Mate is installing carts in the New York City chain Morton Williams Supermarkets.
And a chain in Israel, Yochananof, has also deployed a number of carts. Evergreen, with stores in New York and New Jersey, will conduct a pilot beginning in February.
Other pilots by different companies will be announced throughout 2022.
German drugstore chain dm is teaming with RELEX Solutions to optimise its retail space planning.
RELEX’s space and assortment solution will service more than 2,000 dm stores in Germany and more than 1,800 stores in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, and nine other Southeastern European countries.
Decathlon UK has launched a new partnership with fashion rental platform, Hirestreet, making it the first major sports brand to offer such a service.
Its collection consists of 18 different styles of high performance ski and hiking jackets and trousers for women, ranging from sizes: 6 to 16. Prices start from £15 to rent for a four-day period (RRP between £60 and £200).
Majid Al Futtaim owned and operated Mall of the Emirates has worked with Cisco to launch the ‘Store of the Future’.
The first retailer to take over the space is THAT Concept Store.
An immersive, digitalised, and personalised shopping experience has been created through five of Cisco’s core technology features: Digital Display Canvas, Lift & Learn, Magic Mirror, Beauty Mirror, and Store Analytics.
The number of Nisa stores using the company’s Evolution EPoS system has risen by a quarter in the last year.
Nearly 550 stores now have the system, and Nisa, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Co-operative Group, is on track to hit 700+ in 2022. 190 were installed in 2021.
