Manhattan Associates Inc. predicts five key technology trends that will impact the Australian and New Zealand retail market in 2023.
“The Australian retail landscape will be significantly challenged in the year ahead. Limited stock, growing volumes of returns and increased customer expectations for online deliveries have substantially impacted local brands – pushing them to innovate,” said Raghav Sibal, Manhattan Associates’ Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand. “As a result, retailers will find that they quickly need to adopt new systems and approaches to meet consumer demand for a seamless and more personalised shopping experience in 2023.”
Key retail technology trends for 2023 to watch include:
1. Visibility at all times
The importance of ‘visibility’ will increase and expand to not only include products in motion, but also to product inventory in the store and warehouse. As market volatility continues, shippers will need to have the ability to react to ongoing disruption in near real-time; as knowing exactly where inventory is at any point in time is critical to their success.
Consumers now expect store associates to know stock availability/inventory to be able to serve them effectively. But only 6% of retailers believed that they had an accurate overview of their inventory across their entire network (in-store and online) 100% of the time. It is likely that retailers will work on closing this inventory visibility gap fast in the new year or risk losing customer loyalty and company dollars.
2. Automation and robotics
As labour continues to be a significant constraint for organisations, not least in the context of warehouses, automation and robotics proliferation will continue to accelerate as a result. While we don’t expect robots to replace humans in key supply chain roles, we will see greater progress in man and machine collaboration, as more robots are developed that complement the human workforce by taking over mundane, repetitive tasks.
Automation and robotics have been of great interest among our customers, but many have been held back due to supply chain and resource challenges among those automation/robotic vendors. We see those constraints loosening and the growth of the Robots as a Service model will likely increase in popularity in 2023 as customer’s ‘catch up’ with their automation strategies.
3. The rise of social platforms as marketplaces
A lot of consumers are increasingly interacting with brands and purchasing goods via social media, and using Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook Pay. Companies are fast expanding their reach to younger demographics by exploring social media platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram as sales channels, in addition to traditional marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay. We should expect the proliferation of different social shopping platforms to accelerate at pace in 2023.
4. Unified Commerce
The traditional store and its role in the retail ecosystem is in for a renaissance in 2023, as they become multi-functional spaces, going beyond display and selling to micro fulfilment, returns and even customer service hubs.
Retailers will need to look at technology and how they use it to connect their customers’ digital experience to the in-store retail experience seamlessly. It’s expected that stores will handle a larger share of online returns as retailers look for cost optimisations across their supply chains. Also, as returns see an overall percentage increase, retailers will start increasing the fees/shipping charge associated with returning items bought online, leading to a rise in customers using physical stores for these returns far more.
We can expect Buy Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS) as a fulfilment method to continue to increase as well. With retailers optimising their logistics costs in efforts to maintain margins for online sales, they will find ways to incentivise BOPIS; either by passing on the shipping charge or providing some discounts for BOPIS with the hope that this can reduce their overall shipping costs and increase store footfall at the same time.
5. An evolving payment landscape
Lastly, we expect the appetite for cashless payment options, e-wallets and crypto to continue to grow in 2023. As it grows it will be critical for companies to adopt and leverage these new technologies into their in-store and online systems if they are to keep pace with increasingly digitally-savvy consumers.
