Latest Retail Insight, News, Information & Articles from all top sources for the Internet.

Almost two-thirds (63%) of consumers missed retail shopping ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’ during COVID-19 with 86% regarding physical storefronts as important when making retail purchases, according to the recently released LivePerson Customer Conversation Report. However, the research found that poor customer service is letting retailers down with 38% of Australians not satisfied with their most recent retail customer service experience. Further, 7 out of 10 (71%) have abandoned an online purchase at checkout in the past 12 months due to being unhappy with delivery details or options (42%), wanting to do more research prior to purchase (34%), being unhappy with the price (30%), not being able to find everything they need (20%) and not being able to have simple questions answered easily (17%). The report is based on a survey of 3,012 consumers across Australia, Japan, Singapore and New Zealand who were asked about their customer service experiences in 2020, what has changed for them, and wh...

Most data science companies provide their clients with two sets of data. The first comes from descriptive analysis – describing data with charts and graphs based on what’s happened over the last year or two – and the second comes from predictive analytics, which predicts what will happen in the future using machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sydney-based retail predictive analytics and insights start-up, HIVERY is taking data science to the next level by adding an additional layer with prescriptive analysis – what should happen – removing human effort to understand the data, as well as human bias that sways future decision-making. HIVERY chief technical officer, Andy McQuarrie and HIVERY co-founder and head of innovation, Matt Robards spoke at the recent Databricks ‘Driving Innovation with Data + AI’ APAC event on how they help companies generate a return on retail space investment. Backed by The Coca-Cola Company, CSIRO, and Blackbird Ventures, HIVERY is pioneering...

Traditionally, Black Friday was associated with North American shoppers eagerly filling their carts to make the most of the pre-Christmas sales. Over recent years it has evolved into one of Australia’s biggest in-store and online shopping events of the year too, with November sales growing 42% in the ten years to 2018 . And with many of Australia’s small independent retailers spending large periods of 2020 either closed or operating under capacity restrictions, this year’s event could be especially important for them. At a time when shoppers are more reliant than ever on technology, retailers cannot afford to ignore the importance of having a safe, reliable and efficient website to promote their business, products and offers. Getting your online presence ready well ahead of November 27 is essential in helping to ensure you’re prepared to drive purchases, provide your customers with a premium experience and promote and protect your brand. So, here are a few ways to help build an onlin...

With the emergence of the Covid virus and repeated public health messages to wash our hands well and often, we are all more conscious of how our sense of touch helps us navigate the world. A significant driver of the customer behaviour changes we are seeing is an increased desire for cleanliness and wanting to avoid touching surfaces that others may have touched. Covid looks set to remain a health concern for many months, more than long enough for new behaviours to become ingrained habits. So what does this mean for retail? Shift to online Phygital is a relatively new word that merges “physical” and “digital” and refers to how online and store environments integrate to create a smooth customer experience. More customers than ever are researching and buying online. It’s never been more important to have integrated channels that make it easy for the customer to shop with you. That means every step of the customer journey works seamlessly; with easy purchasing, efficient Click &...

The pandemic has forever changed shopping habits with many consumers spending more time online, both planning and eventually carrying out their purchases. Yet, this increased demand in digital platforms and enhanced overall customer experiences has created an opportunity to reinvigorate a part of retail that has long remained unchanged – the in-stor e customer experience. While most shopping decisions are made online, the large majority of sales still happen in store. In fact, Australia Post is predicting that by the end of 2020, online spend will still account for only 15% of the total retail market.  It is no longer enough for retailers to provide a somewhat superficial customer experience. In a post-COVID world, the journey needs to go deeper by first engaging with customers on their smartphones, offering relevant promotions, and then driving foot traffic to physical stores. Armed with the right data, many retailers are encouraging customers to save time and ‘window browse’ b...

Leading Australia and New Zealand e-commerce destination, The Iconic has chosen Optimizely as its experimentation platform to freely test, iterate and run experiments to improve its customer experience. The Iconic is renowned for its diverse assortment, free and fast delivery, free returns and customer experience excellence. The pureplay retailer implemented exhaustive tests of the Optimizely platform to ensure real-time experimentation made no difference to site performance, considering every second delay in page load reduces conversion by 7%. The Iconic chief marketing officer, Alexander Meyer said, “We pride ourselves on our site speed and Optimizely intuitively understands how important that is to a pureplay brand. With Optimizely we can now freely test, iterate and run experiments to improve our customer experience and internal metrics without having to worry about latency or performance issues getting in the way.” The Iconic head of sport and kids, Rick Burke added: “It was i...

Google Australia is making it free for local merchants to list their products on the Google Shopping tab for free from mid-October. For retailers this means free exposure to millions of shoppers, regardless if they advertiser on Google; for consumers, it means more products from more stores, and for advertisers, it means paid campaigns can be augmented with free listings. Google Australia industry director for retail, Renee Gamble acknowledged that retailers have played a vital role in the country’s response to COVID-19, providing essential products and services, as well as supporting jobs. “As more Australian businesses turn to e-commerce, we have been focused on supporting them in every way we can,” she said. “In the US, where the change was made earlier this year, retailers running free listings and ads got an average of twice as many views and 50% more visits—and small and medium-sized businesses saw the biggest increases.” To help retailers adjust to these changes, Google is...

Sustainability has created the new benchmark for redefining business success, according to Australian premium tea brand, T2, with the global brand releasing its Sustainability Report that highlights the brand’s ongoing commitment to ethical and responsible business practices over the past year. The second annual report has tracked its significant progress achieving new sustainability objectives that have made a positive impact across its team, suppliers, and community. Since committing to its sustainability transformation journey, the company has reached significant milestones including: As of July, 100% of all teawares are ethically sourced, according to strict SMETA or BSCI auditing standards By the start of 2020, 60% of all tea (Camellia Sinensis) was sustainably sourced, which is up from 36% in 2018. 100% of all tea will be sustainably sourced by end 2020; Reduced carbon emissions by 8.2% in 2019, of which 100% was offset; and Diverted over 250 tonnes of waste from landfill ...

For many retailers, 2020 will have dawned with great hope and new ranges, savvy strategies and bold plans designed to delight shoppers across Australia. Through no fault of their own, though, the reality has been very different. The pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes with retailers requiring every ounce of their resilience, innovation and creativity to stay open and active, even as highstreets closed around them. However, as the holiday shopping season approaches on the horizon, retail spend is recovering and highstreets across much of Australia are beginning to resemble their usual bustling and exciting selves. It’s important, though, that retailers continue to seize every opportunity they can; with Black Friday representing a significant day many may be circling on their retail calendar. Marking the start of perhaps the most important holiday shopping season in decades, here’s how your retail business can capitalise on Black Friday. A...

With retailers around the country welcoming customers back into their stores, it’s important not to forget lessons learned in recent months about evolving consumer shopping preferences and delivery methods. At a time when store visits can feel uncomfortable and recreational shopping has been hit hard, it’s a challenge for retailers to balance new regulations with customer experience. Tried and tested methods to increase dwell-time and encourage impulse purchases simply don’t work in the current retail environment. Instead, offering a range of safe alternatives to connect customers with their purchases can give retailers a competitive edge. Contactless alternative delivery options Offering contactless delivery options will help alleviate the strain put on the home delivery network, and keep customers and staff safe. As a result of consumers navigating the ‘new normal’, increasing their interactions with brands online and integrating shopping habits into their daily routines; alterna...

For many retailers, 2020 will have dawned with great hope and new ranges, savvy strategies and bold plans designed to delight shoppers across Australia. Through no fault of their own, though, the reality has been very different. The pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes with retailers requiring every ounce of their resilience, innovation and creativity to stay open and active, even as highstreets closed around them. However, as the holiday shopping season approaches on the horizon, retail spend is recovering and highstreets across much of Australia are beginning to resemble their usual bustling and exciting selves. It’s important, though, that retailers continue to seize every opportunity they can; with Black Friday representing a significant day many may be circling on their retail calendar. Marking the start of perhaps the most important holiday shopping season in decades, here’s how your retail business can capitalise on Black Friday. A ...

With retailers around the country welcoming customers back into their stores, it’s important not to forget lessons learned in recent months about evolving consumer shopping preferences and delivery methods. At a time when store visits can feel uncomfortable and recreational shopping has been hit hard, it’s a challenge for retailers to balance new regulations with customer experience. Tried and tested methods to increase dwell-time and encourage impulse purchases simply don’t work in the current retail environment. Instead, offering a range of safe alternatives to connect customers with their purchases can give retailers a competitive edge. Contactless alternative delivery options Offering contactless delivery options will help alleviate the strain put on the home delivery network, and keep customers and staff safe. As a result of consumers navigating the ‘new normal’, increasing their interactions with brands online and integrating shopping habits into their daily routines; alternat...

Perhaps more than any other sector, retail has had to cope with untold disruption as a result of the pandemic and, with more Aussie consumers now introduced to the convenience of ecommerce than ever before, it’s unlikely that demand will subside. Maintaining a loyal customer base is undoubtedly the biggest challenge for retailers that have not before invested significantly in their online presence. For retailers therefore, investing in customer experience (CX) systems has never been more important. However, despite NTT Ltd.’s 2020 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report , highlighting that 81.6 per cent of organisations know the importance of investing in CX, only 14.4 per cent say it forms a crucial part of organisational strategy. Taking an active step towards investing in customer experience will not only help keep customers coming back in the current climate, but make them loyal brand advocates for life. Customer experience equates to maturity Retailers and consumer brand...

In a continually evolving market it has never been more important for retailers to meet the growing demands for faster delivery and greater visibility, according to Radaro managing director, Brenton Gill. But how do Australian retailers compete and remain relevant in a market that is being shaped by leaders such as Amazon, who have unparalleled resources to invest heavily in logistics and technology? Radaro believes it is through hyper delivery and the adoption of last mile technologies. “Hyper delivery allows retailers to cut down their delivery times significantly by utilising traditional brick-and-mortar stores as distribution hubs to streamline fulfilment,” Gill told Retailbiz. “Compared to the traditional retail model in which orders are dispatched from distribution centres, delivery times can be reduced from several days right down to customers receiving orders within two to three hours of purchase. “With delivery speed and convenience at the forefront of consumer expectation...

The gradual migration from the offline to online economy has been kicked into overdrive, with a surge in ecommerce that is showing no signs of slowing post-lockdown. Australian consumers began taking an ecommerce-first approach to shopping, with entirely new demographics doing so for the first time. Against this backdrop, Australian businesses seized the opportunity: between March and June, more than 10,000 new businesses came online with Stripe in Australia, and accrued in excess of $200m in revenue between them. As swathes of businesses move online for the very first time, an already competitive landscape is heating up. It’s well known that the marker of success in the online sphere is the end-to-end customer experience. The payments experience, however, is often overlooked as the final stage of the online ecommerce funnel, despite it being the difference between making and breaking a sale. So, for those coming online for the first time — how do you get this crucial step right? Re...

  Between social, email, search and video, retailers are spoilt for choice when it comes to communicating with customers. But there’s only one channel that can offer open rates of nearly 90 per cent and response rates of about 45 per cent, both of which far outstrip email’s average open rate of 18.7 per cent in Australia . It’s SMS. In the past few years, consumers have grown to love using this 25-year-old channel to stay in touch with trusted brands – whether for delivery and appointment confirmations, product alerts, or two-factor authentication. Meanwhile, for brands, SMS has simply become the most efficient and economical way to stay in touch with large audiences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, both consumers and brands have become even more reliant on business SMS to communicate and strengthen relationships amid the uncertainty. A more empathetic interaction So why has SMS become so popular? According to OpenMarket’s global Empathy in the Age of AI research, 60 per cent o...

Australia’s first modern shopping centre opened in Brisbane in May 1957 – we have changed a lot as a society since then. The options available to us for shopping, dining and entertainment have exploded and amidst all that shopping centres have ceased to be bustling hubs they once were. In fact, the vacancy rates across Australia’s core retail sub-sectors are the highest they’ve been in over 20 years. A recent Retail Market Overview by JLL reported that vacancy across the Australian core retail sub-sectors increased by 1.3 percentage points in the six months to June 2020, to an average of 5.2%. Sure, some of this is because of the pandemic, but in reality the pandemic just sped up changes that have been happening for a long time. Brick and mortar retail still generates value, but the rise of ecommerce, food delivery and online communities mean we have to rethink how we use them. One effective solution is to move with the times and take advantage of the new trend towards flexible wor...

While retail revenue has rebounded across parts of Australia, it’s now crucial for retailers to ensure sales momentum continues through the rest of the year. However, with COVID cases still an issue in some states and health and safety a top concern for shoppers, retailers are being forced to adapt and pivot their sales strategies to maximise revenue while balancing the new regulations and comfort of customers. Over the past few months, ecommerce and ‘click and collect’ proved an important lifeline as retailers took their offering online and to the curb, to counteract operating under strict social distancing restrictions. However, we have seen in the data that consumers are quick to get back in the store when restrictions are ease and therefore delightful in-store experiences with a focus on customer health and safety – supplemented by an effective, targeted online operation – will be integral to successful retailers for years to come. Afterall, positive customer experiences at every ...

During Covid-19 many retail stores have been forced to close, particularly in Victoria, with customers given the options of shopping online or through Click & Collect. This is a huge challenge for retailers who are now stuck with surplus stock in their stores. Here are key considerations for retailers looking to shift surplus stock: Turning stores ‘dark’ – fulfilling from store If you have surplus stock in your stores, particularly those in densely populated areas, you can turn them into ‘dark stores.’ Fulfilling from stores reduces transportation costs and provides quicker service for customers, shortening the time to deliver from days to hours. It can also reduce environmental impacts and carbon emissions in the last mile of delivery. Real-time view of inventory You can’t shift stock from stores if you don’t know what you’ve got in-store. A distributed order management system that supports global inventory transparency, can supercharge your order fuilfillment to be even mor...

Life is tough in retail and looks set to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Previous downturns show that the fittest survive and even thrive in such circumstances, so what strategies can help beat the downturn? What are you uniquely good at? Businesses that came out of previous downturns even stronger were brands that had clear differentiation. They understood what they were good at and did even more of it. Use your brand and customer strategy to identify where to focus – and if you haven’t got a differentiated strategy, then working on it is your new number one priority. Are you a truly omnichannel operator or still working in channel silos? Multiple routes to customers have been the secret to success so far this year and predictions are that online will stay at a higher level ongoing. Loyal bricks and mortar customers will want to continue shopping with a brand they trust but if the omnichannel experience isn’t easy or doesn’t feel like shopping with the brand they kno...