In the pre-digital era, basic experiences such as quality service and fair pricing are used to meet customer’s expectations. But, with the digital revolution,  customers expect simple, personalized,  and engaging experiences with seamless transition between channels and instant results, among others. 

Customer’s expectations is an ever growing process where today’s relevant methodologies  are not so relevant tomorrow. Hence, customers' experiences are drastically changing with previous experiences with varieties of products and services, and also the information received  from their friends circle and media. 

It is evident today that people are becoming more prone to have a digitalized shopping; picking their intended product from the shelves directly based on their preference and directly moving to the checkout counters without bothering much to the traditional ways of buying. 

Therefore, gone are those days, when customers could only relate to salespeople to reap the know how of a particular product or a service.  With the explosion of information today, customers have become very picky, irrespective of what they buy.  

Today, it has become evident that the people are more inclined towards digitized shopping than going to a physical retail shop. Hence, one has to bring in innovations that can help shoppers to remotely/digitally pick their intended product from the shelves directly based on their preference and directly move to the checkout counters without bothering much to the traditional ways of buying. 

From helping to create efficiencies, save money, to providing better products and services, technology is changing the way every industry does business. Hence it was likely that retail businesses were bound to adopt technology to their advantage. 

Here are some of the top tech trends that will transform retail shopping: 

Predictive Analytics (Big Data) 

There was always an abundance of data in retail organizations, but the utilization of data by analyzing and using the data to solve the problem and create new solutions has become the main pain point.  Hence, Predictive Analytics is here to change that. With this technology, retailers can now be proactive about the future by analyzing consumer behaviour and trends from the past. 

Extended Reality

With the advancements in AR/VR technology, retailers can now offer immersive experiences to meet the customer’s ever-growing experiences. Currently, extended reality is already in use by many retailers today from browsing products to virtually trying them on. 

Recommendation Engines

Today, another powerful tech tool for retailers is called recommendation engines, which has been helping customers find things that they never knew they required to help funnel options to a consumer at relevant times in their shopping journey. The surplus data processing with various algorithms will give access to customer’s shopping behavior. Hence, recommendation tools will significantly aid retailers to benefit from higher cart sales and improved customer satisfaction.