Author: Justin Swagler

Retailers face increasing pressure to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining disciplined capital investment. We see three consistent themes emerging from conversations with customers: A need to consolidate expensive store servers, a desire to establish a unified architecture across cloud and edge, and an urgency to support advanced in-store applications. Businesses seek to transform their stores […]

The retail industry faces an increasingly complex returns challenge that impacts both operational efficiency and bottom-line profitability. With online return rates averaging 15.2 percent – triple the rate of in-store purchases – and returns accounting for $743 billion in lost sales in the US alone last year, retailers need innovative solutions to address this growing […]

Physical retailing – driving 80 percent of all US sales – is undergoing a “Renaissance”; a modernization revolution focused on transforming both shopper experience and operations. To achieve this, stores are re-investing heavily in technology, from point-of-sale systems and inventory management to IoT devices and computer vision solutions. Yet these investments often create what IDC […]

With physical stores still accounting for 80 percent of sales, the pressure to optimize in-store operations has never been more intense. The rise of ecommerce hasn’t just changed shopping habits—it’s created an urgent need for physical stores to deliver smarter, more efficient store experiences while reducing their technology footprint. Physical store companies commonly face the […]

After its re-invention in recent years, online retail is settling into a new cadence. Forward-thinking retailers are using this opportunity to improve the customer experience (CX) and deliver a truly unified, omnichannel experience. To achieve this, retailers are adopting flexible composable architecture and applications. This flexible approach breaks down the traditional silos between multiple channels […]

Today’s retailers not only need to embrace the profound digital transformations happening in the industry, but also deliver real value for their consumers and their organizations. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and other innovations, 2024 marks a pivotal moment for the industry—and physical stores are ripe for disruption. Forrester notes that “retailers […]

Building and maintaining a loyal customer base is critical to the long-term success of retail. This is especially true in today’s multichannel digital shopping space that now even includes hybrid brick-and-mortar “smart stores.” Retail predictions recently released in a worldwide study by IDC strongly indicate that by 2024, 40% of retailers will adopt a multilevel […]

It’s not the end of the physical store The retail industry worldwide has been in the throes of change for a decade as shoppers’ expectations and behaviors evolve dramatically. The pandemic upended previously cherished notions and accelerated the rise of online shopping. Many younger shoppers with high digital awareness now dot the landscape. Yet, paradoxically, […]

In an era dominated by ecommerce and digital shopping trends, the traditional brick-and-mortar retail store stands at a crossroads. The rise of online shopping has redefined consumer expectations, prompting retailers to seek innovative strategies to revitalize in-store experiences. Amid this landscape, generative artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a groundbreaking technology with the potential to reinvigorate […]

How to reinvent the in-store experience, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate innovation with Smart Store solutions on AWS. Although ecommerce sales soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, physical stores aren’t going away anytime soon—in fact, physical stores matter even more today. That’s because stores remain a popular destination for shoppers to discover, research, see, touch, and […]