Decades ago before online buying and digitization, retailers only got profits off their small stores. Online retail is not just meant for online selling rather it helps improve offline sales by leveraging online data. As retailers are dealing with their offline and online stores, they are obliged to leverage the newest solutions built using advanced technologies.

According to the predictions of Gartner, there will be a rise of 3.6% internationally in the tech retail expenditure and it may reach $218.5 billion by 2021 across the world. At the same time, the predicted online retail expend in India could touch $50 billion during the same time, as per a Deloitte report. For retailers in India, it is very important to continue their online stores with digitizing their physical outlets to simplify and improve the shopping experience.

In this report, Deloitte also told that around 70% of Indian shoppers wish digital devices (own or kiosk) personnel for in-store activities like pricing comparison, procuring product information, checking product availability, etc. This demonstrates the growing interests of the new-age customer. Currently, when customers become more self-conscious, retailers are trying to provide more customer-focused experiences — enabled by data, digital and CRM platforms. This balancing modernization is leading another Retail Digital Reset (RDR) with a growing compromise on omnichannel as the ‘retail way’ and data-driven points becoming more significant in the buyer’s journey guiding the digital appetite of retailers.

Digitization has a broader range of possibility than automation, and it stays focused on the effectiveness of established workflows. It invents Net-New data and workflows and is enabled by more players in the retail ecosystem. Digitization allows everyone —a store manager, a regional manager, an auditor, the legal coordinator, the VM enabler and several others — to render their personal spaces into digital, adding it up to the ultimate consumer experience.

This extent of mass participation and data creation requires constant access to computing infrastructure and several accessible tools and these contributors can use to drive the digital agenda. There is modernization and by decreasing threshold to market entry, new ideas and solutions are existing at a faster rate than ever before. The simplicity of distribution, technological advancement and time to market are driving cloud adoption at a very fast pace in India.

Cloud is the latest desktop

The person with an initiative to develop the retail journey can convert it into a cloud service and plug into Enterprise platforms for fast probability and implementation. A rising movement viewed by these digitization platforms is the surfacing of innovators within the organization. Employees understand the business really well including what the consumer wants now. Enabled with user-friendly tools on the cloud, employees are turning entrepreneurial creating a win-win all around. The 24/7 convenience through the cloud (private or public) enables employees to interpret their ideas into micro-services at the highest speed never seen before.

Retailers are digitizing everyday operations so as to convey steady user experiences; retailers are proactively taking measures to adjust their retail operations and to drive better consumer commitment. Attaining insights into such digitized retail measures will open up new business opportunities for retailers.

Digitization helps retailers in analyzing millions of data points every day on digitization platforms to recognize new consumer insights that are coming through different engagement channels and perform on those which may require instant attention. Examples of such data include collecting modification data at stores to be fed back into the range/season plans or discovering reasons why customers did not buy on a specific day or excitedly discovering changing consumer likings.

Though a lot get conversed about digital in the background of consumers, there is proof for a similar big push on digitizing the supply space, which regularly gets neglected. Since retailers enhance their spend on revitalizing customer experiences to drive attraction and stem churn, it needs to be borne in mind to synchronize faithfulness programmes with user expectations, to collect more touch point data and successfully leverage it in order to bring individualized experiences at scale.

Implementation of cloud makes all this easy for, particularly in retail. Increasing accessibility of secure, robust infrastructure from realistic players and falling costs make cloud everywhere and markets are confident that SMB retailers will speed up the adoption of cloud usage to above 90% by end of 2019.