‘showrooming’
noun, informal
Definition: When customers visit a shop to check out a product, but then actually complete the purchase online, sometimes at a lower price. Essentially, the store acts as a product showroom for online shoppers.
It should come as no surprise, then, due in part to its prevailing online dominance, that even as far back as 2013, Amazon was used twice as much as Google for showrooming.16 Even back then, it also found 58 per cent of smartphone owners, or one-third of all US shoppers, showroom regularly. Of those, 56 per cent had bought items on their mobile while in the store’s aisles. Interestingly, 46 per cent of showroomers were also users of Amazon Prime. The study concluded that Amazon is smart at working around exclusive SKUs and merchandise by serving up comparable, competitive items, powered by its recommendations engine. You can imagine this works particularly well with functional items, in books or grocery household categories, for example, which can easily be matched by brand or description, compared to sectors such as fashion or electronics, where the look and feel of the item are more important.
Amazon also recognized this limitation with its timely anti-showrooming patent, granted the month before it announced its Whole Foods acquisition in 2017.17 Having exploited the trend to its own ends, its patent is designed to prevent customers from showrooming in its own stores. It describes a mechanism to identify what content a shopper is accessing via a browser connected to the retailer’s Wi-Fi network. If the content is deemed as product or pricing information from a competitor’s website, Amazon can take any number of actions, from comparing the product searched for to what’s available instore and then sending price comparison information or a coupon to your browser, to suggesting a complementary item, or even blocking content outright. Of course, it also means Amazon stands to benefit from any future attempts by technology providers or retailers to develop similar systems, serving as a reminder of its aggressive competitiveness.
The same visual search capabilities of mobile apps and devices that contain image recognition functionality and features can be used to win the sale at that ‘zero moment’ (ZMOT) in both ‘research online, buy offline’ (ROBO) shopping journeys, as well as in response to showrooming inside the store. Augmented reality (AR) relies on similar image recognition and machine learning AI capabilities that shoppers use for image searches in combination with additional computer vision and geolocation developments. It is so-called because, in comparison to the complete immersiveness of virtual reality (VR) headsets and controllers, AR overlays images, text, video, graphics and other media onto the view that a smartphone camera sees of the real world. AR is an area that retailers and brands have so far only dabbled in, but in the store of the future, it has the potential to really enhance marketing and merchandising during the browsing phase of the shopping journey both inside and outside the store.
Ikea, for example, was one of the first to apply mobile AR in the home sector. It launched an AR app in 2013 for visualizing 3D models of its furniture in customer homes. In 2014, it combined the app with its globally pre-eminent catalogue by allowing customers to put the catalogue where they wanted to overlay the app view and see the actual product in its place. In 2017, Ikea then made use of Apple’s just-released AR software development kit (SDK) for its iOS mobile operating system (OS) to launch the Ikea Place app, which upgraded the view of furniture models to 3D renderings of over 2,000 products that can be viewed from different angles. It also enables customers to reserve the ones they want in the app, which directs to the Ikea site to complete purchases. The home furnishings giant is now considering combining its three apps – for planning store visits, browsing its catalogue and virtually planning décor – into one, after Ikea Place received over 2 million downloads within its first six months on Apple’s App store.
JD.com’s Yihaodian, China’s largest online grocery store, has experimented with the idea of AR convenience stores, allowing customers to use its mobile app to shop virtually at the designated locations. Lego first installed AR kiosks in its stores in 2010 to allow customers to see how a finished model would look like superimposed on its box when held up to the kiosk screen and, in 2015, launched a Lego X app for enthusiasts to build 3D brick models on their phone. Japanese apparel retailer Uniqlo worked with AR specialist Holition in 2012 to introduce a ‘Magic Mirror’ to some of its stores to let customers see how they would look wearing an item they have tried on, but in different colours. In 2016 cosmetics brand Max Factor worked with Blippar, another AR provider, to make all of its 500 products interactive and enable shoppers to reveal multimedia content tailored to each product using the Blippar app.
Even if they’re not showrooming using the Amazon app, or ‘blipping’ products at the shelf edge to access AR content, consumers are developing ever more sophisticated expectations around the level of digital interaction or self-service available when instore, set by their shopping experiences online. Here, Wi-Fi is the prerequisite enabler for meeting these expectations. Yes, admittedly, it facilitates showrooming, but so does the shopper’s own mobile data plan if coverage is available in the store. The difference is that Wi-Fi is also the essential connectivity required by retail store owners looking to maximize returns on investment from any customer-facing digital touchpoints instore. Recalling the reasons why retailers have adopted Wi-Fi in their stores, one once (anonymously) commented that the inability of mobile data signals to penetrate the depths of their wireless network-unfriendly store sites meant that, if they didn’t offer Wi-Fi, they’d lose the sale to Amazon anyway because the customer would leave the store to get a mobile data signal, perform their price check and then never come back.
Also, although mobile data coverage and speeds will continue to increase as new networking protocols and spectrum for bandwidth develop, a key driver for instore Wi-Fi adoption has been to facilitate more digital touchpoints that can enhance the physical shopping journey and dissuade the shopper from completing their purchase elsewhere. At least with Wi-Fi, the retailer can ensure ZMOT can be anywhere in the store, including the shelf edge, where the retailer can exert the most influence. We’ve already talked about how the in-built camera function of a mobile device can help shoppers find similar products they are looking for in the offline world online. But the geolocation features in these devices mean mapping functionality has come a long way too.
Accurate real-time, location-based and mobile-optimized information about the store and its offer can persuade consumers to pay a visit but, once inside, retailer mobile-optimized websites and apps that include ‘wayfinding’ can help them quickly navigate their way to the right shelf edge and find the products they are looking for more quickly. French grocer Carrefour has trialled an in-app service that allows shoppers to receive directions, via their mobiles, to promotions in a store – often linked to individual preferences. It has used 600 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons in its 28 Romanian hypermarkets to connect to an app on shopper smartphones or retailer-supplied shopping carts equipped with Samsung tablets. Carrefour’s Euralille hypermarket in Lille, France also installed 800 programmable Philips LEDs as part of a major refit not only to save energy but to also use Philips visual light communication (VLC), which encodes light waves with data about products and promotions and transmits the information straight to the camera on a shopper’s smartphone. An app then displays the directional information, which helps to guide the consumer to a product location.
The benefit of owning the network connectivity instore is the intelligence it can provide from the data it generates. For example, retailers have traditionally relied on people counting systems that tracked footfall based on infrared camera imagery or the numbers of shoppers entering or leaving the store as they cross its threshold. The store of the future will use data garnered from Wi-Fi and mapping systems alongside other footfall-monitoring technologies to improve store design and layout in line with how their customers shop, particularly in stores with regularly updated assortments and ranges.
In 2017 Apple introduced an AR software development kit (SDK) for its mobile OS – ARKit for iOS – to add immersive virtual and 3D features to its mapping functionality and make up ground on rival Google Maps. Taken with developments like VLC and visual search, AR mapping could also be used to gamify shopping. Shopkick was an early pioneer in this regard, working with US retailers Best Buy, JCPenney, Target and Macy’s from 2012 to make location-based rewards and offers available to shoppers for checking in at participating stores and scanning barcodes of specific items. At the end of 2016, Starbucks and telco retailer Sprint collaborated with Nintendo to add Pokémon Go AR ‘lures’, called PokéStops, and drive footfall by enticing players into their stores.
When it comes to digitizing every instore experience, electronic shelf labels (ESLs) are not new technology. But they do typify the reason Wi-Fi should be basic hygiene in a store of the future that employs technology to build digital touchpoints into the customer experience at the ultimate ZMOT in the discovery phase of the shopping journey. Apart from the fact that a 2018 ESL study found that for 80 per cent of consumers, price has the greatest influence on buying decisions at the shelf edge, for 67 per cent of retailers the cost of manually managing labelling or signage changes related to pricing and promotions instore amounts to 1–4.99 per cent of average monthly store turnover, representing a whopping $104 billion of sales during 2017.18
Coupled with the costly inefficiencies of swapping out paper shelf-edge price labels, which include a band of store associates armed with the pre-printed labels or belt-worn label printers, the inaccuracies that are more liable to occur with old-fashioned pricing methods may also lead to breaches of regulations around the accuracy of pricing19 and product information20 if the store is located in the European Union, for instance. But the time it takes to manually change prices also means the traditional store’s ability to react quickly to competitor discounts is severely limited, putting it at a disadvantage to the might of Amazon’s AI-driven dynamic pricing algorithms that mean it can change prices on millions of items a day. This is compared to 50,000 total price changes made by Best Buy and Walmart in an entire month.21
Given that the ESL study also found accurate pricing is the main type of information shoppers wish to see displayed (82 per cent), with only 43 per cent always trusting that the prices on display will be the same paid at the till, ESLs can enhance the customer experience by also increasing shoppers’ confidence in the accuracy of shelf-edge pricing. Coupled with the improved capabilities of AI computer vision software, facial recognition at the shelf can even help to personalize the experience. Intel showcased its RealSense technology for ESLs at an industry event in 2018, supporting AMW Smart Shelf and Automated Inventory Intelligence software being trialled by Walmart, The Hershey Company and Pepsi across five stores. The software enables digital shelf labelling to recognize when people are passing by the shelves and to display pricing. When nobody is close by they show promotional imagery instead. Kroger was also on hand at the same event, demoing its smart shelf solution. It said that its digital shelf signage allows the retailer to seamlessly change prices and offer a personalized experience to shoppers. The tech was live in 17 stores at the time of writing, and Kroger said it planned to roll it out to 140 stores by the end of 2018.
The bi-directional, wireless communication capacity required to update ESLs can also be turned towards the customer to connect with their mobile devices via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth beacons or the same near-field communications (NFC) technology used by mobile wallets and contactless credit and debit cards. In future, harnessing this connection at the shelf edge to deliver complementary product recommendations, reviews and offers to inform the customer experience will become more important. An ESL can drive further positive engagement by offering more detailed pricing, origin and allergy information, etc than is possible to display on a traditional shelf-edge label. Some retailers have already deployed large-sized ESLs for their capacity to present more information, accompanied with QR codes that direct customers to more information online. European home improvement retailer Leroy-Merlin deployed ESLs to solve the accuracy, productivity and pricing velocity challenges already associated with paper-based labels. But it also used its ESLs to offer customers automatic and real-time geolocation of products inside the store.
Wi-Fi, beacons, VLC, ESLs and AR can all turn various elements of the store into digital points of purchase. House of Fraser and Ted Baker in the UK have tested mannequins fitted with beacons that can send out promotions. OfferMoments uses them to make digital billboards change to display the face of a shopper as they pass alongside offers tailored to their preferences. Its micro-location app allows shoppers to accept and then redeem offers at nearby outlets. Meanwhile beacons have also been used in the drive-through space. Diners can use voice control technology in their car to place a Pizza Hut order, and the restaurant receives an alert of their impending arrival using beacons. Payment is completed via Visa, whose system is integrated into the car dashboard.
Another key area is interactive digital signage. In 2018 Samsung unveiled its Nexshop cloud-based digital store software platform with real-time behavioural sensing using IP and mobile devices. In addition to analysis capabilities, the solution allows store associates to interact with shoppers using cloud-based content via tablets or interactive displays, for a more engaging customer experience. Finish Line and Elo in the same year demonstrated MemoMi smart mirror technology that allows customers to take a photo of themselves wearing new clothing items and superimpose the image on a variety of backgrounds. The screen can text the image to the customer, allowing for easy social sharing of the image.
US-based 1-800-Flowers recently added conversational commerce powered by AI to its instore innovation, telephone ordering, e-commerce, and mobile and social media. It was the first retailer to launch a Facebook Messenger purchasing bot, has an AI-powered concierge named GWYN (‘Gifts When You Need’), and it has partnered with Amazon and Google to allow customers to make purchases with just their voice. But use of voice in the store of the future is coming, and Amazon and its Alexa voice platform could have a substantial play.
In 2017, independent German retailer HIT Sütterlin, based in Aachen, tested an Alexa-based store customer service system to communicate with its customers, offering information on offers and products, in conjunction with digital displays, based on a customer’s voice prompts. The ‘Alexa Shop Assist’ concept developed just for the TechCrunch Disrupt 2017 Hackathon, using Alexa-powered hardware, the Alexa Skill Set and Voice Service, AWS Lambda platform and an iOS app, enabled customers to ask where a certain item is and be told which aisle to go to. It also aimed to track a customer around the store based on where questions are asked.
The store of the future will certainly offer digitally empowered assistance. But, with an emphasis on self-service, where does this leave most retailers’ frontline staff? One retail IT director, who shall (for obvious reasons) remain unnamed, was at a corporate event a few years ago lamenting that ‘the customers were coming into the store armed with more information on their mobile than our store associates’. Here, the digital version of a ‘Black Book’ system used in luxury retail to serve high-value customers, called ‘clienteling’, can empower store staff with digital devices to assist in high-value, high-touch, consultative sales in sectors including health and beauty, consumer electronics, automotive and luxury. In 2016, for example, Boots launched the MyBeauty app to help associates show product information, ratings and reviews, look up inventory online and make personalized customer recommendations based on online analytics.
The role of staff in the store of the future will therefore be to facilitate more digitally enabled consultative than transactional services. They must become proper brand ambassadors. Like clienteling, staff can also be deployed with queue-busting capabilities, using integrated handheld product barcode scanners, card payment and PIN entry machines particularly for cashless sales. But practical consideration must be paid to the bagging and security de-tagging process. More widely used in grocery particularly are self-scan and checkout systems. While they increase customer speed and throughput at checkout, they also shift the entire burden of the shopping journey onto the customer, compounding the fact by asking customers to scan loyalty cards as part of the payment process, just before they leave the store! Indeed, the refrain, ‘unexpected item in bagging area’, has spawned many an internet meme, betraying a strong dislike among consumers for the systems, while retailers have had to accept the increased risk of theft their use carries with them. Walmart dumped its ‘Scan & Go’ mobile app in 2018 due to low take-up, while rumours had it that it was also subject to high levels of theft. However, Sam’s Club and Costco still offer similar instore scan and payment apps, and Starbucks enables payment using the stored value card functionality of its app, customers can also order ahead for quicker pickups.
So, the final phase of the shopping journey focuses on checkout and payment, where the next stage of development is from unmanned checkout to unmanned stores, and ‘checkout-less’ or ‘checkout-free’ shopping. Here, China leads the way. The F5 Future concept store in Guangzau, China uses mobile payment and robotic fulfilment. Customers order and pay for products at a special terminal or wirelessly with their smartphones. The retrieval of goods and cleaning of tables is done solely by robotic arms attached to the appliances. Other unmanned prototypes include Auchan China’s Minute and BingoBox stores and the self-driving Wheelys MobyMart, which rely on the customer using an app to access the store and pay for goods by scanning QR codes, or computer vision that debits the customer’s account on exit. There’s also the 7-Eleven Signature concept in South Korea.
These rivals to Amazon are setting the standard, but it is unlikely we will see the store of the future dominated by unmanned, robot-run boxes. The high cost of the technology involved limits them to small-footprint, convenience formats, and the human touch will always be most prized in sectors that require more consultative sales. But Walmart and Portugal’s Sonae have also both tested autonomous shopping carts for shoppers with limited mobility.
When it comes to the role of robots in the store, examples such as Simbe’s Tally, tested by Target, may take over the repetitive and laborious task of shelf auditing to identify out-of-stock, low-stock and misplaced items, and pricing errors. Others, like the LoweBot, trialled by US home improvement retailer Lowe’s, are capable of limited customer interaction. LoweBot can understand multiple languages and uses a 3D scanner to detect people in the stores. Shoppers can seek the robot’s help to search for any product, either by talking to it or by typing items into a touchscreen on its chest. The robot then guides them to the products using smart laser sensors. Softbank’s Pepper robot has been deployed in multiple customer-facing situations, including taking Pizza Hut orders in Asia, and electronics retailer MediaMarktSaturn has deployed a robot called Paul to greet and guide customers. The German retailer is also among those around the world testing autonomous robotic delivery vehicles developed by Starship, a start-up owned by Skype founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis. Even so, robots won’t be replacing humans altogether anytime soon.
So, we come to Amazon Go, which first opened its doors in Seattle in 2018. The computer vision-equipped, AI-powered store uses Amazon’s patented ‘Just Walk Out’ technology to enable customers to literally walk out with their goods without having to go through any checkout process at all. Customers have to scan their Amazon Go app to gain entry and register a form of payment that is charged when they leave according to what the computer vision systems detect they have taken from the shelves. Its beauty is Amazon knows precisely who is in its store and what they do at every move, while the technology eliminates shrink. The success of the checkout-free model, particularly in attracting repeat custom, according to Amazon Go vice president Gianna Puerini,22 means more stores are likely planned for San Francisco, Chicago and London. But it is hardly unmanned, as staff are on hand to restock shelves and prepare fresh items, and it relies heavily on densely populated, high-traffic locations to make its higher-margin convenience format offset the high-tech costs.
Nevertheless, Amazon Go has raised the game for rival retailers. Ahold Delhaize also announced in 2017 it was trialling a checkout-less concept, where purchase is made by tapping a contactless card against ESLs to verify transactions. Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s tested the ability for customers to bypass the till and pay for goods using their mobile phone, and UK rival Tesco is trialling ‘scan and go’ technology to enable customers to pay for groceries via the retailer’s Scan Pay Go smartphone app in its Express convenience store at its own Welwyn Garden City HQ, and tech giant Microsoft is working on a checkout-less store concept that works by attaching cameras to shopping carts in order to track purchases as customers walk the aisles. JD.com actually beat its US rival to open the already-referenced BingoBox as the first automated, unmanned store in partnership with Auchan, in 2017 (although remote customer service is available, and the store is manually restocked daily). The first unmanned and checkout-less D-Mart c-store opened at JD’s company headquarters in the same year. This so-called Smart Store is equipped with an Intel-based responsive technology suite that includes smart shelves, intelligent cameras, gateways and sensors, smart counters for checkout-free shopping and smart digital signage. The JD solution offers low-cost wholesale or incremental customization flexibility to allow traditional retail store owners to upgrade their operations in a ‘low touch’ and cost-effective way. It also supports JD.com founder and chief executive Richard Liu’s ambitions to open a modern convenience store in every village in China within the next four years.23
Both JD.com and Alibaba’s offline moves arguably deserve more credit than that afforded Amazon Go for the fact that they offer more accessible digitally enabled experiences. With a focus also on fresh, convenience and food service, JD.com’s 7fresh concept and Alibaba’s Hema Supermarkets also blend the best of the physical with QR codes, app-based digital touchpoints including ESLs, and payment. Again, mobile payment will play a key role in enabling the store of the future where – if retailers are serious about automating this final, most friction-filled part of the shopping journey – they also get to tie the customer’s identity back to the final transaction and basket. Both Visa and MasterCard have recently showcased biometric payments to enable customers to bypass queues at the checkout. KFC in China, in cooperation with Alibaba-owned Ant Financial Services, recently launched the first ‘smile-to-pay’ payment system in China. Alipay customers can authenticate their payments through a combination of facial scanning and inputting their mobile phone numbers, which means they need not reach for their wallets – or even smartphones – anymore. 7-Eleven’s Signature store in Seoul uses ‘HandPay’, a biometric verification system that scans palm vein patterns.
While many established store-based retailers are facing the reality of slowing sales and being overspaced, other digital-first players have recognized the critical importance of gaining a physical presence. Stores help support the omnichannel proposition by providing extra flexibility in terms of order collection, returns, service and a physical environment to showcase the brand. So, retailers should bring pervasive tech interfaces, ubiquitous connectivity, and autonomous computing of digital and mobile to bear so the store can support every stage of the shopping journey, off- and online, from browse and search through to discovery and payment phases in ways that match the speed, accessibility and availability of online.
Stores for digital players play a different role from the primary role of the traditional store simply selling products. We believe that these players, with their strong skills and capabilities in technology, are the ones that will really push forward the vision of the digitally enabled and automated store of the future to enhance its role as a powerful, tangible engagement point within their wider customer ecosystems.
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14 ibid.
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