‘In the new distributed commerce world that allows consumers to buy any product, anytime, anywhere, it really doesn’t matter whether a customer shops in a company’s store or on its website or mobile app. It’s all retail. Today’s retailers sell to shoppers any way they want to buy.’
Matthew Shay, President & CEO of the National Retail Federation, 20179
Technology isn’t just raising customer expectations and creating new ways to shop – it’s fundamentally revolutionizing retail. This will naturally be a key theme throughout the book, but here we’d like to specifically explore how technology is resetting customer expectations by enabling a more convenient, frictionless shopping experience.
First, we must acknowledge that the world is much more joined up than it was a decade ago: two-thirds of the global population is now connected via mobile and today there are more mobile devices than there are people on the planet.10 It’s hard to imagine that the iPhone, a device that has become such an integral part of our everyday lives, has only been around since 2007. Google believes that we no longer ‘go online’; today we ‘live online’. With the average person looking at their phone 150 times per day, it’s fair to say that our mobile phones have simply become an extension of us as consumers.11