Customers expect more, driving retailers to deliver a unified retail commerce journey offering a personalized, consistent and comprehensive experience across retail touchpoints. Gartner analysts Mim Burt, Joanne Joliet and Kelsie Marian published the following:
Key Findings:
- Unified commerce is about contextualized engagement with consumers, regardless of device or channel.
- Retailers are still struggling with the execution of fulfillment.
- Customer collaboration is critical to optimizing the in-store experience.
- New technology solutions promise more secure options for payment cards and other personal information.
Vendors:
Blue Bite
Why Cool: It has a cool digital experience engine that allows consumers to use its mobile devices to engage, in real time, with contextually aware content through smart objects that are integrated into outdoor media, storefronts, products and interactive displays. For example, closed storefronts enable impulse shoppers to tap and buy with embedded signage on window displays. In addition, flash sales can be served in real time at any virtual location, and online retailers become local by personalizing interactions in the right place at the right time.
Focal Systems
Why Cool: Focal Systems’ Tablet serves as a private guide to customers while they shop in store, directing customers to their desired products and providing targeted promotions. It is also developing a cool deep learning solution to eliminate the traditional check-out process and allow customers to just “walk out.” As strong competition in retail continues to escalate, retailers must operate more efficiently, all while providing differentiated experiences that attract and retain customers. Focal Systems offers an artificial intelligence solution with machine learning and computer vision, which helps retailers increase sales, improve operational activities and increase customer satisfaction with an engaging shopping experience.
Hypr
Why Cool: Hypr offers a biometric authentication, which creates a simple, fast and more secure method for customers to provide payment for retail products. Hypr empowers global enterprises with the ability to deploy and scale interoperable, biometric authentication into the millions of users. The Hypr suite enables a simple, fast and more secure method for customers to authorize payments for retail and other online products and services. Enterprises are able to reduce the costs of password resets, prevent fraud and provide customers an easier user experience.
PerimeterX
Why Cool: Founded in 2014 and designed for web-scaled deployments, PerimeterX provides a cool solution called PerimeterX Bot Defender, which helps retailers fend off bot attacks. This scalable behavior-based solution is built to protect commerce, media and enterprise websites from all types of automated bot or nonhuman attacks that come through the web, cloud or mobile device. Bot attacks include account takeover, check-out abuse, scalping, carding, scraping and fraud.
ThirdChannel
Why Cool: ThirdChannel provides retailers and manufacturers real-time visibility to in-store execution issues and provides tactical remediation alerts. Since the majority of retail sales still occur in store, retailers and brand manufacturers can use this solution to excel at execution and materially improve sales. A vast majority of retailers still struggle to execute consistently and do not have the tools to do so. In today’s fast-paced shopping environments, retailers must not only have access to real-time data but also be able to use it to make decisions in real time.
Gartner clients can read the entire research here:
Cool Vendors in Transforming Multichannel to Unified Retail Commerce, 2017
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