Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, is the most important day of the year for most retailers. It’s a chance to turn a profit and create customers for life. Those that fail to meet customer expectations may not get another chance.
Ken Morris, a veteran industry analyst with Boston Retail Partners and the Boston Main Streets Foundation explains in an interview why real-time inventory management and advanced analytics are a store’s best friend this year as they seek to merge the in-store and online shopping experiences.
BIZTECH: What do you think will be the difference between the retailers that are most successful this holiday shopping season, and those that are least successful?
I think the ones that really understand their inventory are in a much better place. This is the time of year when you create either good customer moments or bad customer moments, and it’s all about the inventory. If you don’t have the inventory right, and you’re telling customers that you have the latest greatest toy for their kid and they go to the store and you’re out of stock, that customer’s going to be very upset for a long time.
Also, retailers that are creating customer journeys that integrate the in-store experience with the online experience are going to have an advantage.
LEARN MORE: Discover what the future holds for digital retail.
BIZTECH: What are the biggest tech-related trends you’re seeing for retailers right now?
I would point to the combination of brick-and-mortar stores and the customer journey through e-commerce and mobile. It’s really coming to a merger, with that journey involving all of these components.
I think the biggest challenge retailers have on the technology side is that they’re always dealing with yesterday’s information. Even today, 85 percent of the business is done at the local store level, and that’s a very decentralized model. In other words, you’re always looking at yesterday’s inventory information, and that’s not going to cut it going forward. You need to today’s info today. It’s like crossing a street in busy traffic with yesterday’s traffic info. It makes no sense.
If you want to buy a Sonos speaker system and you think it’s at the Best Buy, well, you’re looking at yesterday’s info. You don’t know if they actually have it. And it gets to be a real challenge around the holidays when you’ve got hot toys and hot consumer items — you want to get the latest and greatest for your kids but it’s difficult to find the inventory when you need it because it’s not in real time.
And I think that’s the biggest technological challenge for retailers. They have all of these systems that are out of sync that they bought over time, and all of these islands of automation that don’t work together.