A look back at NRF’s 100th Anniversary Big Show 2011

Neither the storm nor the crowd will have stopped the NRF 100th Annual Convention & EXPO at Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City this January 2011. The retailer's trade-show was the occasion for about 20 000 attendees, all retailer's executives and key employees to attend series of conferences on different topics ranging from in-store visual marketing to cross-channel commerce. It was also the opportunity for more than 500 exhibiting vendors to present the latest trends in Retail. One trend for sure is Mobile Commerce (M-commerce): the ability to link in-store shopping with online shopping. More generally, the most innovative ideas were about improving customer experience which seems to be inline with retailer's main concerns.

In-Store Mobile Apps

IBM was presenting a suite of in-store mobile apps. One of them allows a shopper to browse a virtual copy of the store's inventory while shopping In-Store. Some would find it useless as shoppers in-store have the real products within easy reach. However, the true benefit of this solution is that some shoppers can actually use their mobile to find products more easily, without having to ask a store representative, and that can become a true good shopping experience.

Online Order & In-Store pickup

IBM's Sterling Commerce was presenting its integrated commerce platform. If used both for traditional retail and online retail, the platform allows an e-shopper to order online, pay online (or in-store) and pickup the order at a retail store. What was presented to me and what I found even more interesting is that it can also work the opposite way: in the store, if an item is out-of-stock, the store can check the eCommerce's stock and place the order directly from the POS, then the shopper receives its purchase at home a few days later.

Micros-Retail's Fry, Icongo and Escalate's Blue Martini eCommerce platforms were all advertising similar features.

As eCommerce continues to evolve and becomes a standard channel for retailers, I am convinced that commerce and eCommerce platforms will merge and cross-channel features such as this one will become standard. I can easily imagine this feature go beyond the scope of a retail store/eStore integration. There could be out-of-stock partner networks connected to the POS that would let stores “save” a purchase by ordering any out-of-stock merchandise on their POS from Amazon for example. Amazon would ship the product to the in-store's shopper, and Amazon would give a commission to the retail store on that purchase.

3D Fitting Room For Retail Websites

A company called Imagine That was showcasing an Augmented Reality (AR) technology that allows shoppers of an online store to “Try” a product in their browser. The solution uses the visitor's webcam to capture a live stream of the visitor and place an image of the product on the visitor's body. The only downside of this technology is that it requires the installation of an additional plugin.

Virtual Touch-Screen Display

Intel was presenting a large intelligent display for apparel stores that allows shoppers to browse through a store's catalog with their fingers à la iPad, find products they like and even assemble a personalized outfit. Besides the fun aspect of these displays that could be beneficial from a customer experience perspective, these displays could potentially bring another substantial benefit to retailers: gain of space. Imagine an apparel store with no real products displayed, only walls of touch-screen displays that shoppers would use to select products they like and then get these products sent to a fitting room where they could try them, this is – perhaps – the future of retail store.

Other Interesting Technology

• Payvment: Facebook storefront solution that allows to push an online store's catalog on its Facebook fan page.
• Google Commerce Search: The video demo speaks by itself. For those who were not convinced yet that Google would be a major player in the eCommerce realm.
• IBM Coremetrics: IBM finished acquiring Coremetrics last year and now offer a Powerful Enterprise Web Analytics suite that is fully integrable with IBM's Websphere.
• Why has the web won? (NRF's Big Blog)