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Retail chief information officers are weighing technological advances that streamline the in-store checkout process, refocusing on an area they say has lagged behind.
Retailers during the epidemic Investments have poured into e-commerce, as many question whether consumers will return to physical stores entirely.
After two years, they are consumers. give back. E-commerce now accounts for 16.4% of all retail transactions, down significantly from 18.8% during the pandemic, according to the National Retail Federation.
Although cost may be a barrier to making some of these investments, CIOs say they may lose their customer base to older in-store technology.
Neil Holden, CIO of British retailer Halfords Group Plc, said: “Physical locations are lagging behind” and the risk of failing to modernize is that they don’t attract customers.
Tech Leaders in companies like Kroger Co.
Nordstrom Inc.
And Halfords are considering new technologies that can improve the payment process for customers, providing a seamless in-store experience that customers use when shopping online.
At Halfords, a supplier of automotive and cycling products and services, Mr Holden said it was researching technology to send payments via voice waves. The technology used by the military involves encoding information into sound waves and then sending it through a speaker to another device. Customers can initiate the payment through the app, he said.
Kroger is testing a shopping cart equipped with cameras and sensors that track what customers buy so they don’t have to scan individual items as they come out, said senior vice president and CIO Yael Cosset.
Mr Cosset also said he was looking at the possibility of installing checks in private aisles so customers could check out on the spot if they wanted to grab an item quickly.
Kroger CIO Yael Cosset.
Photo:
The Kroger Company
“There is an opportunity to avoid the conflict,” Mr. Cosset said. “If customers are saying, I’d love to be able to grab a sandwich and walk out with it, then we’ll create that experience.”
Dennis Bauer, Nordstrom’s president of credit, loyalty and payment services, has his eye on new technology that allows payments to be accepted through a mobile phone instead of a traditional payment terminal.
Proximity chips in smartphones allow users to pay at the register, but with new technology they can be used to accept payments from cards or smartphones, said Nicky Baird, vice president of strategy at retail technology provider Aptos. .
Eliminating separate checkout hardware provides more flexibility and convenience, allowing associates to see customers wherever they are in the store and cut down on long lines, Mr. Bauer said. If retailers set up smartphone partners for such tasks, they can reduce the amount of necessary hardware purchases by allowing them to use one device for both tasks, he said.
But according to CIOs, the main barrier to these investments is cost.
“If you have hundreds or thousands of stores, it’s a big expense if you think those devices are going to break,” Mr. Bauer said of smartphone-to-smartphone payments.
Halfords’ Mr Holden said: “Margins can be very tight, so investment capital budgets can be very tight. “It’s never enough.”
In addition to price barriers, Kroger’s Mr. Cossette said it’s wise to block some investments based on what the consumer really wants.
Technology exists to provide completely frictionless shopping, with cameras tracking shoppers around stores and automatically charging them, a phenomenon known as cashierless stores. But privacy concerns combined with large camera installation costs make it impractical, Mr. Cosset said.
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com
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