Retail, for all it's innovation in marketing and presentational approaches, is decidedly old fashion and stogy when it comes to technology. Indeed most retailers that have an ecommerce presence today separate it away from their mainline businesses and the two never meet. For the ecommerce teams that are technologically savy, they are disconnected from the retailing experience in their own way by living in ivory towers away from the day to day operations of their bricks and mortar cousins. The result: retailers simply fail to operate as efficiently and effectively as they might otherwise, and newer technologies that may allow a retailer to distinguish themselves from the pack get ignored.
Take, for instance, that I am writing this article on a new web browser: Flock, a web browser aimed at socializing the experience of web browsing by providing built in links to social networking sites; gross simplification, but 'it' in a nutshell. I can already see the opportunities that this sort of technology, moving the web selling beyond simply browsing web pages (merely evolution from the catalogs those pages replace) to a more experience driven way to engage the consumer to deliver the message. Some of this isn't so direct either, perhaps its enough to be a presence and then available once the consumer is ready to buy.
I must admit I find the whole subject rather frustrating. I believe it originates with corporate retail management and then works it's way down to the rest of the business. Retail IT leadership is at fault, too. Here is the golden opportunity for IT to prove that it can be more than a cost center (which the more savvy companies new wasn't the case to begin with) and nearly every IT dept I've worked with is just focused on transaction processing.
The good news is that as time passes and the earning (and thus spending) power moves to a new generation, and the management duties as well, I think upstart retailers that can afford the risk of a new view of the world will emerge. This is where the new WalMarts, Limiteds, and Gaps will come from. We likely won't see this from these mainstream companies upfront.
Blogged with the Flock BrowserTags: retail, technology, marketing, internet, ecommerce
