Composable commerce is when retail businesses create modular architecture that can be made from interchangeable building blocks so that functionality can be added when it is needed. Retail CIOs can plug in new capabilities using APIs, microservices and other modular elements, or cluster existing services to create a new one.
Every retail CIO faces the same challenge: how to maintain profitability in the face of perpetual disruption. The possible impact of persistent inflation is just the most recent addition to the profitability challenges faced by the retail industry since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
The company that brought us the Kindle, Amazon Prime, and a world of hilarious reviews, will now also sell us products in brick and mortar department stores too.
McKinsey estimates the potential annual value of AI in the retail industry sits between £300 billion and £600 billion. It's clear the opportunity for companies is substantial.
But what exactly does an AI-powered future look like?
At the beginning of every new calendar year there appears a slew of articles full of predictions about what the Retail domain will have to contend with in the coming twelve months, together with prophecies and expectations of technical trends and challenges.
There will sometimes appear a left-field outlier of a suggestion amongst the lists, but in general they tend to concur with wider, more deeply understood technical trajectories of the most popular themes.
In recent weeks I have been engaged on customer assignments where the holistic value of an all-encompassing approach to systems integration truly demonstrates the business benefits of omnichannel. With multiple streams of purchase opportunity and associated sales fulfillment retailers need to take account of how, precisely, their omnichannel strategies not only execute operationally, but also to better understand what the data being generated by each stream can contribute to the ‘bigger picture’ of customer insight.
With the festive season well behind us, we are now in a period where retailers are announcing financial results. They are advising the waiting world of how well (or otherwise…) they’ve performed in this vital part of the trading year.
The Retail sector has often been an innovator. Take the digitisation of product data through the use of barcodes. Prosaic little graphics which we all simply take for granted today, Retail barcode usage began in the mid 1970’s and revolutionised many aspects of how goods were manufactured, dispatched, tracked and sold.