Retailers and the challenge from mobile devices

As the mobility revolution shows no sign of slowing down, personal mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have become indispensable parts of our daily lives. Mobile applications provide users with instant services anytime, anywhere; from taxi hailing, takeaway delivery to online shopping.

The widespread ubiquity of mobile devices has presented many retailers with an immense challenge: is the brick-and-mortar channel still relevant in the age of fast-growing online shopping? 

From the consumer’s perspective, the solution to such challenge is customer convenience, which can be presented in several ways:

• If the consumers buy from your online shopping site or from one of your brick-and-mortar stores, they should be able to return products in other stores that bear the same logo.
• If the consumers buy from your store in New York, their loyalty points should still apply in your store in Beijing or London or Dubai.

Retail is a consumer-centric industry. It is your mandate to make these conveniences possible. And retail management software like Retail Pro is at the forefront of helping you turn possibility into reality.

An advanced retail management solution helps you unify the multiple data sources in one comprehensive system. The two most critical components of retail data are inventory data and customer data. Retailers gather data from a number of different sources such as POS, e-commerce portal, mobile POS (m-POS), or third-party systems. Unified data visibility provides retailers with the following benefits:

- Centralised data management: all of your data is in one place.

- Centralised insight: you have a complete picture of your inventories and customers anytime, anywhere.

- Analytics and reporting: a single source of truth greatly enhances the performance of your BI (Business Intelligence) application.

Retail Pro ensures that all of your data is integrated across channels and location, and could easily be accessed by many types of mobile platforms such as iOS, Windows Phone, Android, and m-POS. The integration of digital and physical channels gives retailers a greater opportunity for increased customer loyalty and revenue.