Retail is one of the focus areas of EIT Digital. Our high impact initiative Smart Retail will bring retailers tools to create a seamless shopping experience for their customers whether in-store or online. Our innovations on cloud based services, in-store analytics and customer interfacing are packaged into a Digital Retail Suite for shopping centers, showrooms and pop-up stores as well as large events.
The team working on smart retail solutions met on 9-10 June in Helsinki to demonstrate the progress so far. "Omnichannel data is increasing becoming an important source for business opportunities in smart retail environments. Consumers expect to have a seamless experience in store, as well as anywhere online that best fits their shopping needs. In this way, customers are becoming omnichannel in their thinking and behaviour, and retailers are increasingly using analytics to capture omnichannel opportunities", states Smart Retail activity leader Sandro Battisti from EIT Digital.
What is the Digital Retail Suite?
The Digital Retail Suite, coming to market in 2016, is a modular software solution including data analytics and digital marketing for combined physical and electronic commerce. The ad agencies, event organizers and also shop owners can choose to use or purchase the solutions or just some features depending on their needs.
With the analytics part of the Suite the retailer can analyze customer's behavior both online and in-store, and help retailers to predict customer's buying decisions - just to mention a few. As an example, the retailer will be able to understand what items customers take from shelves to their cart and based on this send advertisements on related products while the customer is still in the shop. He will be able to plan the shop layout better by seeing which areas are more crowded and which unused.
Digital Retail Suite will offer tools for the retailer to push context-aware individualized messages to customers. The advertisements, and offers will be personalized based on the customer's previous shopping history, location inside the shop and the time of the day and week.
"The high impact will come out when retailers will be able to run their IT operations from the cloud services provided by the Digital Retail Suite. This will increase loyalty and engagement of consumer, both online and in-store", says Petri Liuha, action line leader for Smart Spaces, EIT Digital.
The following EIT Digital partners work together on the high impact initiative Smart Retail: Aalto University, CNR, DFKI, Deutsche Telecom, Engineering, Forum Virium Helsinki, Nokia Technologies, Philips, Politecnico di Milano, Reply, Technical University of Berlin, Telecom Italia , Trento Rise, University of Helsinki, and VTT.
Check out the video on Digital Retail Suite
Author - Suvi Lavinto
