17/04/2019
Top retailers to introduce real-time pricing in physical stores, according to Gartner
Gartner, one of the leading authorities in digital commerce development, comes with a very interesting prediction for the near future regarding the top brands and their sales in physical stores.
Namely, they claim that the best retailers will enable real-time pricing in their physical stores, and not only on marketplaces and online outlets.
The entire idea revolves around the full omnichannel approach to digital commerce, where all operations, including pricing, will be centralised and unified under a single platform.
The advantages
The advantages of this approach are numerous. First of all, the top retailers will be able to be competitive to the marketplaces which already have pricing adjustment automated. This will definitely result in better customer engagement and increased sales.
Furthermore, it will be possible to react quickly and adjust prices. It includes even different pricing for different customers based on all relevant parameters such as loyalty card, discounts based on previous spend and similar.
The challenges
Although the benefits are obvious, there are some serious challenges as well. First of all, the retailers would need an eCommerce platform that has the technical capabilities to provide this service across all channels. It is something that doesn’t possess a real problem, but it will have to be implemented.
The second challenge relates to the physical stores themselves and the technical issues of displaying prices there. Digitally displayed prices on the shelves are still rather rare and don’t fit the needs completely, while manual prices display has physical limitations and is simply impossible to carry out in real time.
The solution to these problems lies in prices being displayed on mobile devices of the shoppers via the app, and that is yet another step that will need to be covered in the entire process.
Still, they predict this to become a trend only with the top retailers in the near future, and these companies have all the resources they need in order to pioneer this process.