Corner-shop Software Cornerstones
Somewhere around a decade ago when Compaq’s arguably most-revered CEO Mr Eckhard Pfeiffer left his tenure at the helm of that particular ship, I joined him and left my role in the Middle East where I worked for his publicity people. In a strange twist of fate, Pfeiffer turned up as grande fromage (sorry, that should be großer Käse) at retail ecommerce outfit Intershop and I ended up in the UK working for him in a similar role.
Intershop (and this is 10-years back remember) used to be able to make headlines by telling people that their software could help ecommerce work in hitherto unimaginable ways. Picture this: “If it’s a sunny day, our software can help Sainsbury’s Homebase put garden chairs and parasols on its homepage within minutes, thus driving sales for these and other good weather-related products.”
Woah – hold on. You mean a web page could feature differing content dependent on external factors and the Internet could be presented as an almost, well, “living” type of thing? You got it.
Ten years later, Herr Pfeiffer appears to bringing his Germanic charms to a role at General Motors – and the rest of us kind of pretty much realise that the web is a totally fluid and dynamic entity these days.
Why this reminiscing you say? Well, shop front technology is still a huge part of the way the retail trade operates by all accounts. The latest news I see details the fact that IBM and Sky IT Group are helping fashion and apparel suppliers to take advantage of consumer trends by equipping them with a software as a service (SaaS) offering.
These days we’re more focused on the granular detail of these systems and opportunities for manufacturers, distributors and retailers to view their product sales performance at the store level and opportunities for merchandisers to “slice and dice” information and make informed production, orders and markdown decisions based on real-time product sales performance.
I will not go any deeper into this story as it’ll start to read like a case study and this is a blog, but it did get me thinking about retail tech all over again. No doubt there’s probably a magazine called Retail Technology (actually, I just checked - there is and it’s edited by a superb freelance colleague of mine) as this kind of IT is now part of the fundamental mechanics of the shop trade.
“For my part, I spend so much of my time talking about this subject that it’s kind of hard to remember a time when the retail business wasn’t underpinned by a fairly progressive and intelligent technology backbone. But in the marketplace itself, it’s only the businesses that really get it (the Tescos and Play.coms of this world let’s say) that are going to survive the latest consumer turmoil in the wake of the recession. While others may fall, the new breed of retailers will quietly mop up market share from those casualties that don't,” said Miya Knights, editor of Retail Technology Magazine.