Programming is becoming essential to retail success
If you are looking to succeed in retail, you are going to have to learn to code, hire a coder, or be prepared to buy a lot of subscription software.
There are now many facets to the retail business, and many of them involve some form of customized IT. Here is why programming is becoming essential to retail success.
The optimisation of your website
This is perhaps the best example of how coding and programming has taken hold in the retail world.
It is very easy to set up a WordPress or a Shopify website and have your business running online, but if you want long-term success, then you are going to need to start building your own.
Your website needs to conform to whatever your customers want. It needs to make the buying process as smooth as possible, and it needs to work in tandem with your marketing in order to convince people to buy from you.
If you don't have the skills required to keep optimising and changing your website to suit what your consumers want, if it isn't evolving to become better at its job, then you are going to struggle to maintain your success.
The bigger companies hire teams or developers to keep their websites running. If you don't want to hire developers yourself, then you will need to learn how to code/program so that you can customize and grow your website yourself.
Creating an app
Many online stores now have their own apps. If you sell the sorts of things that would work well within an app, then creating one is a very good idea.
However, the creation of an app is tricky work, and even if you don't build it yourself, it pays to understand the coding behind the app.
If you understand the coding, then you can update the app as time goes by. You can also check the code to see if the programmer left a security back door in your app.
There are “Learn to code for kids” websites that push the idea that people in the future will need to learn coding simply because it will be a part of everyday working life. People won’t be asked to sweep the floors, they will be asked to fix the robot that cleans the floors.
People won’t be serving at counters, they will be coding solutions to the digital menu sign.
Again, you don't have to build the app from the ground up, you should simply learn coding so you can fix up the app when you have it. Just like how you don't build your own car, but you may learn how it functions so you can fix it up yourself.
The future of retail programming
In reality, we have no idea how programming will affect retail overall in the future.
Will digital sign programming become a bigger deal, will cloud-based apps become a thing, will online tools become as popular as smartphone apps?
Nobody knows, but the time and tides are turning towards a heavier use of programming in retail, and this shouldn't be ignored if you are looking for long term success in the retail sector.
