Retail was well and truly rocked at the end of April with a special event that took place at the Hard Rock Hotel in the heart of Amsterdam.
Our CEO and co-founder, Jens Levin, gave the keynote speech on the endless opportunities created by the evolution of retail. Jens was joined by experts from the leading commerce solution providers OIL by Magnus Black, Brink Commerce and Voyado who dived into the benefits and best practices of using composable commerce architecture to design and deliver personalized customer experiences.
If you missed out, here’s our top takeaways from the event:
1. Composable commerce is the future…and achieving it is easier than you think
The retail software you choose - whether it’s a CRM, eCom, footfall counter or Mobile first POS - and your IT architecture, play essential roles in helping you deliver the kind of experiences your customers desire.
What these experiences look like will differ, not just from brand to brand but from customer to customer. And that’s why you need a flexible best-of-breed way of thinking, to be able to set up and orchestrate systems and processes that work for you and deliver on your customer promise.
This ‘composable’ approach - built on simplicity, adaptability and open innovation - means you can quickly adapt to customer needs and market dynamics.
Besides making you as a retailer more agile and adaptable, according to research from Gartner, the composable approach also most often leads to reduced overall costs.
Think of it like Lego. You have an open box in front of you. How are you going to slot the pieces together? What colors are you going to use? How can you build the structure you really want and you know is going to work for you? And how will your final ‘structure’ benefit everyone who uses it - whether that’s your store associates or customers?
Composable commerce means you can easily adapt to new and emerging customer behaviors. One of the biggest fears surrounding it is the misconception that creating a composable IT ecosystem requires a huge amount of effort to set up.
The reality is very different. In fact, workflows between Sitoo (POS), OIL (order management), Brink Commerce (ecomm), and Voyado (loyalty) were set up in hours thanks to the strength of the REST APIs the solutions use.
In short, moving to composable commerce will give you less headaches, help you sleep better at night, result in smoother operations, and give you the agility you need to create positive shopping experiences for your customers every single time.
2. Don’t be limited by legacy
Cast your mind back to the early 00s. What phone did you have? Unless you were still rocking a flip phone and trying to be Neo from The Matrix you probably had a Nokia in your hand. And they were great right? They did everything you needed them to do, they didn’t break, they even had Snake! What more could you want from a phone?
Of course, the rest is history. Along came the iPhone and the smartphone game was changed forever. You wouldn’t have ever dreamt you needed a smartphone but now it’s almost impossible to imagine life without one.
The Nokia phone is like a legacy solution. Typically, it does the job it’s meant to do. It’s safe. It’s been around for a long time. But you’re never going to be able to achieve the same things a best-of-breed, composable IT ecosystem can.
Legacy limits what's possible. And staying in a legacy environment means you’ll inevitably end up spending time, money, and valuable resources trying to achieve a goal that you’ll never truly be able to reach. With a best-of-breed approach, the possibilities are endless.
3. The time to change is now…but it takes courage
Physical stores have changed, shopping behavior has changed, software has changed, and the competition has changed. And these changes aren't going to stop. Retail is in constant evolution and this means if you don’t change with it, you’ll get left behind.
No one knows what will happen in five or ten years from now, so you don’t want to end up in a backseat situation where you don’t have control over your tech. You need to be the driver.
Embrace change and build change into your approach to software. Be flexible, agile, fast and responsive.
But realize you don’t have to change everything at once. Composability doesn’t mean instantly changing from one software provider to fifty. It means finding the solutions that best serve your business. Focus on the things that increase sales, improve operational efficiency and provide a fantastic customer experience. Empower your associates with the right tools so they can serve your customers, give them what they want when they want, and always feel like they can say ‘Yes’ to any question your customers have.
With a new mindset and approach to retail software, you can create your own retail ecosystem to create the kind of omnichannel retail experience you know your customers want.
Want to find out more about composable commerce and how the marketing-leading Unified Commerce Platform anchored by POS can help you create positive shopping experiences every single time? Then we’d love to talk to you.
