Wireless Payments

I mentioned the wireless payments in my latest article about the future of the financial industry and it isn’t limited to finance, but covers retailers, too. If you are living in North America you may use your smartphone to pay for all the goods in your cart, your cafe latte at Starbucks or your pizza by Domino’s.

Paying with your phone, using the NFC-technology, is easy and almost everywhere. Businesses are easily adopting the new technology and rolling out the foundations for something that could help them to co-exist by the side of online-retailers.

Probably we don’t have to go to the checkout in the shop again because we are paying by “scanning” a product and leaving it through a detector which is automatically withdrawing the expenses from your bank account or charges your credit card. It’s easy, it’s comfortable.

All digital, but not on remote

A shop giving you the opportunity to purchase a good by a simple chip in your phone only is fine. But loyalty-cards are important, not only if you are visiting a Starbucks and want a free latte after ten ordered coffees. And again tech will help stores and customers to increase the relationship between both parties. While recognizing a returning customer which is possible through a kind of unique ID for your phone. The information will be available if you stand in front of a digital price tag. If you are a good customer, if today is your birthday or something else, you may get a discount on some products. Offline shopping will be individualized and will feel like a visit on Amazon. Pregnant women could get a discount on diapers or baby clothes, a just married couple could get a discount on romantic movies in the media department.

Technology will help every store to know what you came in with in your bags and what you added. It could become a difficult time to thieves. And you can leave the store without a bad feeling because you didn’t stopped at the checkout to pay.

Big Data and Artificial Intelligencewill manage the zoning in the store

Christmas is arriving fast, the customer’s focus is changing from average stuff to extraordinary objects as presents for your friends, parents, kids or your partner. Ear rings, game consoles, toys, coats or books are becoming more popular again. Department stores and supermarkets like Publix could react and change the zones in the market. Why? Big data and artificial intelligence are analyzing trends for every day, every week and every month, compare it to each other, compare revenue streams and propose a new zoning to increase the revenue for the upcoming season.

The computer would not only calculate the most promising position for a zone like electronics, but also try to predict revenues for new products and withdraw products from stock if their revenue is too bad. A “virtual store manager” could be an intelligent one, finding the best mix of revenue-optimization and — that’s important — energy-saving positioning. Probably it is a bad idea to deploy refrigerators next to the entrance in summer? There are many good examples.

Buy here, take the delivery at home

It is comfortable not to carry bags filled with all the stuff you can buy. Probably this can change in future. You could enter a shop, buy a good by holding a phone with NFC-technology at a product and order it. Next day you take the delivery at home.

Several eBay-shops in New York City, NY or Berlin in Germany do so with QR-codes which can be translated by every modern smartphone with a camera. Now imagine you take a break from your office work, go down the street for thirty minutes and want to buy a toy stronghold for your son, but you don’t want to carry and store it the rest of the day in office. You can take it at home.

Shops offering a service like this can save money if they don’t have to rent extra space to store the goods which probably nobody will purchase. Of course you would still have some units of a product in the store because your customers want to see, want to touch and feel or wear a cloth to know if it suits or not.