We have seen a lot of change this year in the retail sector but next year will be even more important. Retailers are focused on re-platforming to future-proof solutions and consumers are demanding more than ever before.
2014 will be a year of even more drastic change being deployed — speaking for us and our customers. Several projects in our pipeline that are going live next year will demonstrate our customers’ commitment to meeting and exceeding consumer demands.
Here are our predictions for how retail will evolve in 2014:
Darryl Adie, Managing Director, Ampersand Commerce. Tweet him at @DarrylAdie.
This quote was originally posted on The Guardian, 12 Dec 2013
“Next year, the high street will be central to both online and bricks-and-mortar retailer success. Online retailers will eye up the high street to establish a physical presence, through pop-ups or more permanent showrooms. Traditional retailers will continue to develop in-store value propositions that trump online, such as delivery times of as little as 90 minutes thanks to their closer proximity to customers. Click-and-collect will move from being a differentiator to being a hygiene factor for high street retailers as consumers’ expectations continue to grow.”
Jay Bammeke, Business Analyst, Ampersand Commerce.
“As the UK slowly comes out of recession we have seen two things unfold regarding successes (and failures) of retailers at both high and low ends of the market. This past year the ‘value’ segment of the market spectrum has seen significant growth and profit, with the likes of single price retailers and value retailers such as Poundland & Home Bargains enjoying unprecedented profits. Surprisingly though, at the other end of the market spectrum the ‘high end’ & ‘luxury’ retailers have also seen increased profits and growth, for example John Lewis, Bentley and Marks & Spencer’s. As families feel the pinch, consumers have either gone for the cheapest proposition or sought out the best quality and service in procuring products and services. John Lewis have excelled not because their prices are the cheapest, but they offer a superior end to end customer experience.
I am certain that it will be another two years or so before the UK has fully recovered from the recession and during that time this consumer behaviour will only intensify. Consumers will be more astute and demand a specific return on their investments, no longer accepting the ‘average’ proposition. Technology is so quickly advancing. There is more technology in the average smartphone than there was on the shuttle that landed on the moon! But technology has yet to be fully exploited retail. Next year we will see a massive increase in the integration of digital into the physical retail customer experience. Retailers will start to encourage online price comparison and will employ smartphone-integrated experiences like checking out with your smartphone, using phones to employ targeted loyalty schemes and Bitcoin will soon be accepted as a payment method in retail shops. Fundamentally change is coming and it will be big.”
Andrew Smith, Front-End Developer, Ampersand Commerce.
“With the release in October by the W3C of its ‘Selectors Level 4′ editors draft, CSS4 is well and truly on the horizon with some awesome new features in the works. The way front-end developers write CSS in the future will dramatically change with the introduction of parent selectors, negation / time-dimensional pseudo classes and combinators. We get improvements to both structural / input pseudo classes and some handy new attribute selectors that will vastly improve form design and manipulation. This will lead to more uniform UX with less reliance on custom javascript for key functionality. Legacy support for these features will always be an issue but none the less it’s exciting stuff and hopefully we can expect to see them becoming available over the next year.”
Tom Lancaster, Business Analyst, Ampersand Commerce.
“Online shoppers will feel more like an individual than ever before, with personalisation becoming the norm. Retailers will continue to use the vast amounts of data they gather to tailor the user experience, providing the intuitive product recommendations, spot deals and checkout journeys which make purchasing effortless. We’re not too far away from starting to see the type of intelligent content and layout personalisation, which is now common on news websites, change the way we shop online.”
Yousef Cisco, Front-End Developer, Ampersand Commerce. Tweet him at @yousefcisco
“We’ll see less ecommerce sites using responsive websites for mobile. Many are already shying away because they want to control every aspect of the mobile user journey and retain the ability to have all the bells and whistles on their desktop site. We’ll also see a rise in desktop sites that are tailored towards tablet users.”
Daisy Chu, Helpdesk Support Analyst, Ampersand Commerce. Tweet her at @AWorkingDaisy
“Bitcoin will start to become more widely used as a legitimate alternative payment option and payment gateways will have to start coping. It will be interesting to see how that pans out.”
Joseph McDermott, Senior Developer, Ampersand Commerce. Tweet him at @Joseph_McD
“Last year I predicted that 2013 would be the year of responsive design. While not entirely accurate as far as the term ‘responsive’ goes, the prediction was not entirely inaccurate since in 2013 there was, and continues to be, quite an obvious increase in the amount of content optimised for mobile devices. In 2014 merchants will continue this by considering mobile-first design decisions, whereas previously the mobile site might have been more of an afterthought, something to consider once the ‘main website’ (i.e. the desktop version) had been completed.
The most exciting thing for me about 2014 will be the seamless integration of CRM with ecommerce to provide a truly customised shopping experience for each individual customer. For example, in-store behaviour would impact how products or promotions are displayed when signing in to the website and conversely providing special offers or promotions to the customer when they arrive at the in-store till if they have been a loyal online customer.
Most ecommerce websites these days have a customer login area as standard, but in 2014 we will begin to see the ‘My Account’ experience integrated into more of customer experience. I am excited to see how personalisation continues to evolve.”
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