retail | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Connecting people to spaces

Smartphones, beacons and smart software are the key to future retail success believes Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell

Beacon technologies are one of the hottest items in the Internet of Things with retailers, sports stadiums and hotels looking at how they can use these devices to improve their operations and customer experiences.

At Dreamforce 2014 Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell spoke on the event’s wearable panel about how their service plugs into beacon technology and customer service.

Proximity Insight was born out of the 2013 Dreamforce Hackathon where Orell and his team were finalists. From that, the company set up operations in New York with a focus on customer relationship management in the retail industry.

Retail isn’t the only the field that Orell sees for Proximity Insight with the hotel and casino industries as being other targets.

“With the hotel, why check-in? Why not walk in and let your smartphone do it for you?” Orell asks.

“It’s all about making live so much more seamless and slick,” Orell adds. “There’s opportunities in every sector.”

For businesses looking at rolling out beacon technologies the key is to be adding value to enhance the customer experience, Orell believes.

“You have to be delivering something to the customer beyond tracking them, it’s about making the whole retail or hospitality experience better. It has to benefit the customer.”

With beacon technologies now becoming common and the supporting hardware being built into all smartphones, we can expect to see more applications coming onto the market. It’s worth considering how your business can use them to enhance the customer experience.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2014 as a guest of Salesforce

This is not toy time

A podcast with Profitable Hospitality’s Ken Burgin on payments and the hospitality industry

We’re past the time where business owners can dismiss new technologies as toys says Profitable Hospitality’s Ken Burgin.

Ken’s Profitable Hospitality website is a must read for anybody in the industry and I was lucky enough to be the the guest of his 99th podcast where we discussed payment systems, marketing and the challenges facing restaurant and cafe operators in a changing marketplace.

In the podcast we discuss PayPal’s plans for the retail sector along with how startups like Stripe look to disrupt the sector and what Apple’s announcements last week will mean to the payments industry.

The key message from the podcast is the entire sector is facing massive changes both from technology and changing consumer behaviour.

Like many other industries, the successful restaurant and cafe businesses over the next decade will be those who have the flexibility to adapt to a very different world.

Activating main street

PayPal lays out its vision of the future of retail

The future of retail is being fought out on three fronts believes eBay’s Michael Camplin — global, local, mobile and data.

At eBay’s Commerce Innovation Showcase at its San Jose head office Champlin shows visiting partners, media and government officials part of the payments giant’s vision for that future.

“It’s about connecting buyers and sellers across the globe,” says Champlin. “Local is important for us because even with the growth of the online ecommerce revolution that we’re in the middle of right now we still see 75% of commerce happens within fifty miles of the customer and 90% of that happens in bricks-and-mortar stores.”

“So to be able to connect buyers and sellers in those local stores is a major push we have at eBay.”

The first presentation in the tour demonstrates a day in the life of an eBay customer from the bedroom of a fictional customer, Reese McLaren, a funky young guy shopping for new equipment ahead of a camping trip. Champlin illustrates how Reese can order, pay and collect through a store’s integrated online service from his home.

On the other side of the transactions, store employees use the PayPal apps like Red Lazer and Braintree to complete the order. A key part of that is using beacon technologies to log a customer into the store to alert staff that a customer has arrived to collect an order.

At the next stage of the tour, we visit some demonstration stores; first we start with the Burger Bistro where eBay’s Eric Armstrong shows how restaurant’s point of sale system is integrated with PayPal services, showing waitstaff who is logged in through the company’s app.

Integrating PayPal’s services into the establishment’s point of sale system means customers can order through the PayPal Wallet service and waitstaff know if a customer has paid through the app.

The app also speeds up settling customers’ bills as diners can pay the check through their phone and not bother with using cash or swiping credit cards.

One key point with PayPal Wallet is that users can enter any payment form that suits them and choose whichever option suits them at the time including direct bank transfers and credit cards.

Another area that PayPal are pushing out are coupon offers. At present the company is subsidising them as they test how the services work. The objective is to offer a digital equivalent of everything people currently have in their wallets.

For staff, eBay are offering the ability to bring your own device for point of sale systems with cloud base apps turning staffs’ tablets and smartphones into POS terminals.

Tying into the Point of Sale capability is the PayPal Now service that allows establishments to swipe credit cards directly into the app through a dongle that reads the chip or stripe. Despite the rise of online payment services, swiping credit cards is still the main way US customers pay their bills.

Despite the continued popularity of credit cards, eBay are hoping to move customers over to the online services through ease of service; the one stop authentication service means customers are logged into the payment platform as soon as they check into a location.

One area PayPal sees great opportunity in stadiums and major events where attendees automatically check in and can then access food and souvenir stands without having to re-authenticate or authorise each purchase they make.

A key part of eBay’s retail strategy is the use of beacons to monitor customers entering establishments. The one illustrated is the PayPal beacon that was a limited release earlier this year. The device doesn’t have its own battery, instead relying on a USB socket for power.

Two weeks after this tour Apple launched its Pay service with its range of integrated APIs to offer many of things shown in this showcase. eBay and its Braintree subsidiary was conspicuously missing from the listed partners.

For PayPal and eBay the field has suddenly become more competitive, this is a sector that is now at the forefront of the battle between today’s internet empires.

Changing the payments industry

The effects of Apple Pay are being felt by the payments industry

It didn’t take long for the effects of Apple’s payment service to be felt by the industry, within a day of the announcement Bloomberg reported Apple is negotiating with US banks to shift transaction fees from merchants.

At the same time Bank Innovation reports the major credit card companies are considering changing the definition of ‘cardholder present’ rules which would make app based purchases cheaper.

The changes Apple Pay is bringing in is part of a wider move to easier, frictionless commerce as Stripe co-founder John Collison discussed on this site last week.

For the banks and credit card companies this means a very different operating environment. What was once a very profitable business is now changing rapidly and profits may not be so easy to come by.

Tipping and mobile payments

During the recent switch over to chip and pin payments, many in the restaurant industry feared that tips would fall and waitstaff would lose jobs, the reality is somewhat different claims PayPal.

This post is the second in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

During the recent switch over to chip and pin payments, many in the restaurant industry feared that tips would fall and waitstaff would lose jobs, the reality is somewhat different claims PayPal.

Last week I had the opportunity to tour the PayPal Innovation Centre in San Jose where they showed off the work they are doing in the retail and hospitality industries to change payment systems.

One of the products they showed was their Pay At Table app that integrates into a café or restaurant’s point of sale system and allows customers to pay their bills immediately.

The immediate reaction to this has been resistance from restaurant managers who were worried customers to skip without paying. For waitstaff, the worry was they could be replaced by an app.

It turns out the technology has had a different effect, the productivity of floor staff in the establishments where the app has been trialled has improved substantially.

“In a typical café it takes around ten minutes to get the check,” says the lead demonstrator of the Innovation Center, Michael Chaplin. “We find that freeing waitstaff up to help customers and letting them pay their bills faster means everybody is happier.”

With that ten minute per table improvement, management have found customers’ satisfaction has improved and the waitstaff have seen tips improve – partly because diners are happy and also because the tipping is integrated into the payment, calculating an appropriate gratuity is always a hassle in the United States.

That ease of payment from mobile phone and table apps is rolling across industries, it’s not just limited to the hospitality sector. Increasingly these technologies are being used by tradespeople, retailers and across the service industries

Increased productivity is more than just saving money and reducing staff numbers, it’s about giving the customer a more seamless and easy experience.

All business need to think carefully about how they can use technology to improve their service and increase revenues.

Rise and fall

We live in rapidly changing times. Incumbents and market leaders shouldn’t assume their positions are safe.

Twenty years ago UK supermarket chain Tesco was an also ran.

A decade ago it was the market leader.

Today Tesco is in trouble again as low cost European competitors like Aldi and Lidl have chipped away the British majors’ market share.

A few weeks later, Tesco shares plummeted on revelations the company’s profit guidance had been overtstated by 250 million pounds with the company’s chief executive Dave Lewis announcing several executives have been stood down as auditors investigate the descrepencies.

Tesco is a very good example of how quickly how competitors can come from behind in today’s marketplaces; first Tesco itself during its 1990s rise and then its crash in recent years.

We live in rapidly changing times. Incumbents and market leaders shouldn’t assume their positions are safe.

Regent Street fights back

London’s Regent Street shows how main street retailers can use new technology to reinvent themselves

Main street shopping strips have had a hard time over the past forty years as supermarkets and big box stores have steadily drained customers away, however the new wave of retail, manufacturing and logistics technologies may be an opportunity to revitalise them.

A good example of shopping strips using new technologies is London’s Regent Street with its smart shopping app that integrates with iBeacon location devices, the website Contactless Intelligence reports how shopkeepers, landlords and the local authorites are rolling out an initiative as part of a £1 billion regeneration project.

London’s Regent Street is a fairly unique mainstreet in that it’s extremely upmarket which gives it a lot of advantages over most neighbourhoods, but it does point the way for how other shopping strips can use new technologies to reinvent themselves.

Winning the three-legged race

Merging two trouble companies rarely resolves the underlying problems

Does tying together two lame men give you an Olympic sprinter?

It’s quite common in the business world to see two second rate companies merging in the hope that their combined market share will give them enough momentum to overcoming the market leader.

The tactic rarely works as the businesses running third, fourth or fifth in a market are usually doing so because they have ordinary products or indifferent management rather than any inherited size disadvantage.

Merging two second-rate companies usually results with a pair of competing silos of mediocrity where the former workforce and management of the original business squabble over power in the new entity.

Far from being more competitive, the merged company is even more distracted with internal politics and power plays.

The story that Australian department store Myer proposed a merger with its rival David Jones is a very good example of this as two poorly run companies whose managements that have abjectly failed to adapt to the modern times, try to paper over their chronic problems by merging.

Both companies have failed internet strategies – Myer’s website managed to collapse during the Christmas sales season and no-one could be bothered fixing it for over week.

Along with lousy internet strategies, both companies have underinvested in IT systems leaving their point of sales and logistics systems antiquated and incapable of meeting modern customers’ needs.

Probably the greatest mistake that Myer and David Jones’ management made though was a focus on cutting costs through reducing sales staff.

The resulting lousy and often pathetic service resulted in both brands being seriously tarnished and had the effect of driving high value customers away.

Further damaging the stores reputation was the tactic of offering perpetual sales which trained the customers that would still shop with them into waiting for goods to be marked down rather than paying full price.

Merging the two operations would have done little to resolve any of the long term management failings of the two businesses, although no doubt there would have been some fat advisors fees for some of the boards’ friends.

Nothing fixes poor management better than getting rid of the poor managers, merging two poorly run business like Myer and David Jones does nothing.

Retailers failing as their poor management struggles to deal with changing marketplaces is an international problem, as this story about US chain Sears illustrates. The Australian experience though is a classic case study of two poorly led organisations trying to pretend their failings can be fixed through mergers.

Resolving the problems of troubled companies like Sears, David Jones and Myer involves having good management and smart investment, merging with a similarly troubled organisation solves little except perhaps putting off the day of reckoning.

Big Data, retail and the 80/20 rule

Retailers are using big data to apply the 80/20 rule – or Pareto’s Law – to reduce returns and shrinkage

Sorting out troublesome customers is one of the major benefits that big data offers businesses, a profitable example lies in reducing returns to online stores.

One of the banes of online retail is dealing with returns, the industry pioneers overcame objections to shopping over the web through no-questions-asked returns policies that’s trained customers into expecting they can send items back regardless of the reason.

The Frankfurt School of Finance and Management’s Christian Schulze surveyed nearly six million internet transactions and found returns are effectively costing online retailers half their profits, as The Economist reports.

Leaving that sort of money on the table is painful for any business and online retailers are trying to find ways to reduce those return costs by sacking their customers;

But this risks a backlash: rejected shoppers are likely to rush to the newspapers or social media to complain—and their gripes may turn other, more profitable customers against the firm.

Much of this comes down to Pareto’s Law, that 80% of your problems will come from just 20% of customers, and a key imperative in business is to get the troublesome, high maintenance customers buying from your competitors without being too obvious.

Identifying those troublesome customers is where Big Data comes into play, coupled with intelligent analytic tools businesses are able to identify who is more likely to return a product or dispute a bill before the sale is made.

As the Wall Street Journal reports many online retailers are exploring ways they can reduce the return rates using Big Data and analytics.

By giving buyers access to their purchasing history stores are able to suggest when a customer is buying something that isn’t appropriate or the wrong size.

The WSJ cites fashion retailer Rue La La, which lost $5 million in returns last year, as an example.

For instance, a customer who has continuously bought the same brand of dress shirts in both a small and a medium might see a note pop up saying: “Are you sure you want to order the small? The last five times you ordered both sizes, you only kept the medium,” Chief Executive Steve Davis said.

Another tactic for retailers is to discourage frequent returners from buying high margin goods through targeted vouchers and offers. One point the WSJ article makes is how differential pricing is going to be applied – if you regularly return goods then expect not to be offered the best discounts when you visit the retailer’s website.

Many returns though are the result of genuinely dissatisfied clients and this is where improving customer service kicks in, the WSJ describes how some retailers are now providing video tutorials for their products and increasingly smarter customer service can be used to avoid returns.

With the increased sophistication of customer analytics and support tools, we’ll see online retailers squeeze more profit out of their businesses as well as look after their most profitable clients.

The problem for ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers not deploying new technologies is they won’t have the tools to compete with their savvier online rivals.

A good example of legacy managers struggling in the face of chronic under investment are Australian retailers and this week the Myer department store chain had to shut down its online outlet after the system collapsed.

There is no timeline on when Myer’s website will be back up. It’s a tough time for those retailers that haven’t invested in modern system and an even tougher time for companies with legacy managers like those at Myers.

The use of big data in analysing shopping behaviours is one area where well managed retailers will out perform their poorer rivals, it’s hard to see how companies like Myer will survive in the modern era of business.

Shops of doom

Some locations are the kiss of death of businesses.

“Location, location, location” is the mantra for real estate investors and property speculators, that rule is just as true for those setting up a shop or cafe.

When you pay attention to the retail strips or malls in your suburbs you’ll notice how some locations are doomed to fail.

The featured picture in this post is what should be a good location in the centre of a dining strip in an affluent Sydney suburb. Just fifty metres either side of the premises are successful and long running cafes.

However this spot has had five different business fail in the last three years and in the past decade hasn’t had a single stable tenant.

The question is what causes this? Is it because the landlord’s are greedy?

In some cases it is, the featured premises had a stable tenant in a very nice and well priced fish restaurant for many years. When the landlord jacked up the rent, the seafood cafe moved out and the place has struggled ever since.

Something many people have mentioned to me over the years is how difficult they find it to negotiate on price with landlords over commercial space with the owners very reluctant to budge on rents.

Often, the letting agents are prepared to throw in sweeteners like fitout costs, rental holidays or paying utilities but it’s very rare that the headline rent will be negotiated down.

Part of this could be due to the properties being valued as a multiple of their monthly rents; so if the leasing rate falls, so too does the property value which is bad news for the landlord and their bank.

When landlords get too greedy properties lie vacant for a long time. A good example is nearby to the featured property.

The bike shop that occupied this unit for about 12 months moved out over two years ago and before that it had been vacant for a long time. Despite being on a busy commuter strip in an affluent suburb, it’s a lousy location with poor visibility, truly awful parking and lousy amenities.

In a genuine free market the rent should fall until a business that can operate in such a low turnover location can afford it, that no entrepreneur can make the numbers work indicates the asking price is too high.

Although even the cheapest rents won’t help a truly blighted location which is why it might be a good idea to ask around the local shops and residents to see how a location has performed before signing that lease.

It would be a shame to doom your business because of a lousy choice of location.

Pay Pal and the Modern Spice routes

PayPal trace the modern online spice routes with some important messages for retailers.

Online payments company PayPal has released a paper on the The Modern Spice Routes which describes the pattern of online trade across the US, Germany, UK, China, Brazil and Australia.

The results are a snapshot of how online commerce patterns are evolving.

PayPal commissioned the Nielsen Company to survey 6,000 online shoppers about their cross border online buying habits to determine some of the characteristics of global internet commerce.

What immediately stands out in the report is the United States’ dominance with 45% of global market share, China follows with 26%.

At the bottom of the pack is Australia with 16% and, surprisingly, Germany with 13%.

The US itself is an interesting study with the most preferred overseas shopping destination being the United Kingdom followed by China.

Why are people shopping online?

American respondents were overwhelming shopping overseas to access more variety, with 80% of respondents citing the reasons for shopping offshore being “more variety that cannot be found locally”.

Finding more variety was the key factor in all the markets. Even in countries like China and Australia were respondents cited saving money as their main reason for shopping internationally online, more diversity in offerings came a very close second.

That in itself show the opportunity for companies selling internationally – be unique and don’t offer what can be found at the local WalMart or Tesco.

Illustrating this, the PayPal report cited Australia’s Black Milk clothing and Germany’s Hatshopping as two international success stories.

Intra-region trading

An understated point with the report is just what proportion of international shopping is of each country’s spend – in the United States’ case it is only 18% while in Australia it’s 35%.

Illustrating those internal trading patterns are the British and German figures that show online shopping in other European nations is substantial, so intra-EU trade is a considerable factor.

Similarly, the second popular destination, after the United States, for Chinese online shoppers is the Hong Kong SAR. In fact the Chinese statistics show that intra-Asian trade is just as substantial as EU commerce with Japan, Korea and Singapore all feature highly on the list of shopping destinations.

This illustrates a problem for Australia as it has neither the United States’ massive domestic market or a group of closely integrated neighbours and the high level of international online shopping indicates just how poorly local merchants are doing with their internet strategies.

Indeed, for Australia that the proportion of online shoppers buying overseas is so high should be a worry for local merchants.

Today’s modern trade of bulk carriers, courier companies and shipping containers is very different to the spice routes of Marco Polo’s day, the world is evolving around new trading patterns right now.

For businesses like Australia’s retailers those changed trade routes may not be kind to those who can’t change.