5 Tools Everyone in the Retail Industry Should Be Using

People often ask me about the next big thing in retail. It’s clear that the environment is changing rapidly, with the explosive growth of mobile commerce, and the scramble to understand what consumers expect from omnichannel. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can see how some retailers have already been successful in this new landscape and what that implies about where retail is headed.

Here are my five favourite tools that will make retailers’ lives much easier for the foreseeable future:

1. The Samsung Galaxy camera – It’s a camera phone without the phone. People don’t want to read about inventory. They need to see it. This camera is equipped with a 4G cellular and fast Wi-Fi so to immediately get inventory photos online. I use this to edit pictures on the fly and send them to social media for flash sales.
2. Curata – Staying on top of mind and maximizing wallet share means staying in constant contact with customers. A steady stream of relevant content can swamp a retailer like myself, who has a lot of other operational considerations on their mind. Curata can curate all the content and its self-learning engine makes the job easier as time goes on.
3. NFC chips – It’s still early for applications, but NFC is available now for communicating directly with customers in store and sending them videos. It also offers and shopping recommendations as customers move through a store.
4. Brickstream stereo vision analytics – Revenue is only part of the profitability story. Lowering costs will affect ROI more immediately. I use this app to greatly reduce theft, shrinkage, and liability costs with in-store cameras with 3D vision and the brains to look for hazardous behavior.
5. Openbravo Commerce Platform – Own multichannel retail commerce platform can be the most valuable tool of all because it handles all of retail’s toughest challenges. It offers retailers end-to-end support from supply chain management to a web-based POS (point of sale). It keeps me prepared for any changes coming to retail from the web, mobile, or cloud with a centralized system that is easily scalable and extendible. The use of Openbravo for performance analytics needed to understand what’s going on in the business will helps youe make better plans for the future. You can check out all of Openbravo’s features, ranging from sales to customer relationships, not to mention operations and finance.

These are mine, what about yours? Which ones will you add to the list?

Hope you found them helpful 🙂