Four retail technology trends to look out for in 2022
Within the last couple of years, retail technology and virtual merchandising outlets have been drastically affected by lockdowns, occupancy, and distance restrictions.
And so it’s no surprise that many companies who have inevitably pished even the non-tech-savvy consumers to e-commerce have found themselves struggling with getting know the retail technology sector.
Nevertheless, this new generation of retail employees and consumers has instigated a fertile ground for the adoption of new technologies and strategies to engage with clients, expanding the opportunities and possibilities within the scope of the internet as a whole.
This has led to many businesses adopting these new technologies and has also provided the reasoning for why small businesses need IT support now more than ever. If you’re looking for a place to start, read up on the stand out retail tech funding rounds after this blog post.
Technology has given today’s retailers the opportunity to seek out the newest trends in the retail industry and therefore begin to set new standards on what is functional and acceptable.
Let’s have a look at the most important of them.
Trend one: cloud-based platforms for higher reliability
The fact is that most in-store teams lack the knowledge and experience necessary to comprehend complicated planograms and implement recommended modifications without deviations.
Even more so when it comes to generic strategies that must be implemented in stores with varying space configurations and consumer demographics.
Cloud-based platforms are technologies that enable you to create new application architectures that are robust, elastic, and agile, allowing you to respond faster to digital change.
Trend two: AI for maximised performance
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a practical technique to improve corporate decision-making.
Each choice is presented as a series of processes, with intelligence and analytics instrumentalised to inform, learn from, and refine these processes.
Through the use of augmented analytics, simulations, and AI, decision intelligence may assist and enhance human decision making, as well as possibly automating it.
To make AI delivery more efficient, AI engineering automates data, model, and application upgrades. AI engineering, when combined with robust AI governance, will operationalise AI delivery to assure its long-term economic value.
Trend three: privacy enhancing computing
Privacy enhancing computing protects the processing of personal data in untrustworthy contexts, which is becoming more important as privacy and data protection regulations evolve and consumers' worries rise.
Privacy enhancing computing makes use of a number of privacy-protection approaches to extract value from data while still adhering to regulations.
Trend four: the emergence of headless e-commerce
The term "headless commerce" refers to software architectures that segment what customers see (the front-end interface) from essential commerce activities like payment processing and inventory management (the back-end software). Essentially, the technology allows for simple selling through a variety of channels.
Businesses that use portable backends, data, and data structures may be able to respond quickly to market changes.
Most significantly, the headless design enables companies to offer multi-platform shopping experiences by displaying the best frontend tools for each platform/device.
