Report Sample on Digital Retailing

Introduction

Traditional ways of doing business have revolved around physical stores where consumers meet the sellers of goods. These are retailers and wholesalers in general. The wholesale business is conducted by the big firms that provide the products in bulk from the manufacturing and various production industries. For a long time, the supply business has thrived, leading to research on how this business's advancement can be reached: learning customer behaviors and preference in the market.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

With technological advancement, the business's marketing sector has adopted smart technologies, mobile shopping, and e-commerce. The digital means of marketing has eroded institutional retailing as the primary interface contact with the customer. They are developing a framework that identifies new sources of value creation and advances to transform digital retailing. Digital retailing allows for the prevailing of stationary retailing.

The interaction is from a single point in a multi-channel retailing process. Increasing the merger of various digital platforms that market various goods with the network connections of devices and the retailing platforms shifts the authority to new trends in the market. The trends in pre-purchase research, shopping, and post-purchase response is adopting new trends.

It has come about by adopting technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things, and most recently, block chain technology. These digital trends enable retailers to reach out the consumer expectations and address consumer needs more efficiently and effectively. It has made digital retailing a fast-growing marketing channel with increased competition for business survival for various wholesalers and their brands and the retailers. These ventures invest more in edge technologies.

Digital Retailing Impact

Digital retailing has led to big changes in retail and commerce operations. It uses AI across the supply chain from product creation initiation in its development, supply, marketing, and customer engagement. Artificial Intelligence comes up with recommendations. It involves using voice assistants and cloud services in that shoppers can buy products and exit the online store without passing checkout. It has brought about increased efficiency in e-commerce and a better retail experience for retailers.

Artificial intelligence also has the scan and go features where customers choose their goods and checkout payments using their mobile devices. Artificial Intelligence also uses facial detection features to detect dissatisfied customers at the points of sale. The internet has provided tightened retail and consumer connections enabling them to communicate and exchange data. This invention also helps to track product deliveries.

Cloud computing networks several remote servers that are hosted online through the internet. These servers store data on bookkeeping, managing and processing data for the organization providing the goods and services, and consumer information. Cloud computing is efficient in analyzing large volumes of data and real-time inventory management and evaluating the consumer preferences, which allows for the analysis of preferred and intentional personalizing of their offers to the customers.

It brings about increased comparative advantage, and it has become a widely adopted technology. There has been a transformation of the physical business into online buying and selling. Apart from the digitization of physical business, the stores have been upgraded to smart stores where they are cashiers and paperless money payment where the buyer pay with their cards and other online payment methods.

Digital payments have been increasingly adopted as the modern means of payment, mobile devices have applications that are networked with the banks, and the sellers can receipt the payments and release the products. However, this trend has been a disadvantage to the people who have been eliminated from their work line. Also, the adoption of robots and voiced commerce services where voice assistants help people compare prices and make purchases where consumers make verbal statements to enquire about the products online. The customers then add them to the cart and complete the buying process. Retailing logistics has increased with ease since both the seller and the consumer can track a product's movement from the point of sale to the destination. It has helped the buyer know when to expect payment and when the consumer expects the delivery.

Emergence of Hypermarkets

Digital retailing helps business owners to use e-commerce platforms to optimize online sale processes. Digital retail allows shared monitoring of the growing need to integrate point of sale and e-commerce solutions fully. It is useful in removing all the alarms to search for customers. It allows for ease in making more sales online compared to the physical sales of products.

However, business ventures have had to accommodate both their customer from the online platforms and the physical store's customers. It is made possible by synchronizing both online and offline inventories and transactions. They are also promoting the business to the two groups of customers. Hypermarkets are adopting machine learning and forecasting methods and approach with quick and easily adaptable changes that are easy to implement.

Customer choice of a select hypermarket to do their shopping is dependent on its physical location and the presence or absence of other retail centers around the area. The upcoming hypermarkets have to consider the design characteristics and customer requirements in terms of efficiency since the investment of the physical facilities in the stores and the physical outlook play a part in the appeal to customers.

Also, retailers' goal is to reach as high several customers as possible; therefore, advertising and the promotion of sales play an important role in informing customers and wooing them. Digital trends have helped increase awareness of their opening and persuading customers to patronize the hyper-market. The future digital retailing trends predict the use of robotics in various work levels such as cleaning, shelving goods, overseeing the security of the premises.

Robots with combined artificial intelligence will detect and notify about safety hazards and even analyze shelf inventories identifying the discrepancies and inconsistency in records and notify the general manager. The rising hypermarkets are using robots for their business tracking, including linking their store chains with artificial intelligence. They help out retailers manage large inventories, cut costs, and ease store operations.

For example, recent trends have shown that programmed robots with GPS access can deliver a customer's ordered product right to the doorstep. The delivery robots will collect data in terms of distance from the point of sale and tell about the frequency of sales made by the hypermarket and the judgment of the customers wants and give predictions of future customers wants and expected trends in the market.

Link Between Information Systems, Supply Chain Management, and Management of Merchandise

The linkage between information systems (IS) and supply chain management (SCM) activities improves the performance of operations in an organization. Various information systems help the supply chain to reach operations more efficiently (Modgil & Sharma, 2017). The various information systems include the operational information system, strategic information system, and the infrastructural information system.

The information system in supply and merchandise management should be connected at various levels to support the value chain fully. The supply chain and information system management, and internet channels tend to be unique from the traditional store channels. The store management systems analyze the inflow and shipping out of products from the stores. The non-store channels are focused on customer-related information systems.

The supply chain is either a demand-pull supply or demand push chain. It is determined by the influence of the customer to the store or the store to the customer. Also, circumstances have shown that manufacturers can outsource supply chains. Either way, it is determined by the nature of business and product or how the customer demands the goods.

How Customers Evaluate Quality Retail Services

Customers evaluate services provided by retailers in different ways. Therefore, a business needs to ensure that its customers are satisfied to sustain them since they are always making decisions about what to buy and where they will make their purchases. In ensuring customer satisfaction, especially in digital retailing and marketing platforms, it is important to understand the consumers' perception with regards to your products.

Perception is a process that involves the consumer to identify, organize, and interpret information to attain meaning. In this case, customers use selective perception according to their needs and want. Thus, perception is a psychological variable in the purchase decision process that greatly influences the customers' behavior. Other variables include learning, motivation, lifestyle, personality, and attitude.

For successful marketing efforts and customer maintenance, a digital retailer must understand these purchase decision process variables. It also helps in the interpretation of the consumer buying process. Customer experience is another factor that influences how customers evaluate retailers' services, especially in digital retailing. Customer experience involvement and satisfaction with the product are influenced by four main factors: social influence, situational factors, personal factors, and the product itself.

Personal factors include the perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and values of the consumer. Customers are more involved with products that meet their needs and can hold relevance and importance in their lives. For example, clothing consumption can be affected by religious and cultural beliefs that discourage women from exposing their body parts.

Level of income, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation are some of the personal factors that influence customer experience. Consumer experience can also be influenced by the information they have regarding the product they are purchasing. Customers' ability to distinguish the product's characteristics can influence their involvement, experience, and satisfaction with the product.

Conclusion

Therefore, retailers need to educate consumers about the products they are purchasing and ensure that they are highly conversant. Customers with higher knowledge about a particular product tend to be more involved with the product as customers perceive the product to be more important. Many situational factors influence customer experience, satisfaction, and involvement with a product by the product enriching and comforting the consumer's lifestyle.

It makes the customers frequently consume and involve with these products. Retailers should identify how a product will make a consumer get more involvement and consume a product more frequently, which will increase the business's sales. Social influence can also affect the consumers' choice of products that they consider and consume.