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- Physical Retail
- 3 mins
For today's brick-and-mortar stores, shopping isn't just an activity anymore — it's a whole sensory experience, transforming shopping into a journey through a wonderland of high-tech delights. For retailers worldwide, this altered-reality shopping experience might help bring people back into the stores and lure them away from armchair shopping through e-commerce websites.
Tech Integration in Retail
Walk through any retail aisle today, and you'll see shoppers with their heads buried not in the merchandise but in smartphones and tablets, either doing a bit of comparison shopping or texting friends to share finds. Long-vexed by mobile devices, savvy retailers have now developed an attitude of "if you can't beat them, join them." They are finding new ways to integrate smartphones, apps, e-commerce solutions, and social media platforms into the physical shopping experience.
Virtual and Augmented Reality: How Stores Are Luring Shoppers Back
In this maturing digital age, retailers know that they need to be able to sell a total experience — one that shoppers can't get by staying home looking at a computer screen. The best way to do this is to embrace technology, making it an ally rather than an e-commerce enemy.
Thanks to virtual and augmented reality tools, physical stores can now offer shoppers a wealth of sensory experiences beyond the tactile sensations of feeling and touching the merchandise. For example, tech-savvy stores like Nordstrom and Ikea are integrating e-commerce platforms into a comprehensive physical shopping experience that seems to merge science fiction with shopping. At Nordstrom, shoppers can visit virtual reality stations with avatars modeling everything from suits to sunglasses. At the same time, at Ikea, they can use augmented reality tools to see how a sofa will look in their living room.
Personal Shopping in the Digital Age
Decades ago, sophisticated retailers offered personal shoppers to help navigate customers through the pitfalls of choosing gifts and wardrobes. Today, these personal shoppers could easily be algorithm-based AI, virtual shopinistas telling shoppers about the latest trending brands on Instagram and TikTok right in the store.
Pop-Up Stores: A Success Story
One of the trendiest innovations to emerge in recent years is the pop-up store—a phenomenon that arguably owes its very existence to social media. Pop-up stores have been around for decades—designer Comme des Garçons in Berlin introduced one of the first in 2. Still, social press and the relative ease of setting up the store infrastructure have energized the tactic. The pop-up phenomenon has also introduced some eye-opening pairings. In March 2018, cosmetic company Glossier created a pop-up store at popular San Francisco eatery Rhea's Café, enabling shoppers to nibble on chicken sandwiches while choosing lipsticks. More recently, in 2023, renowned fashion brand Off-White opened a highly publicized pop-up in Paris, integrating NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) to offer limited-edition digital and physical merchandise.
The announcement of a sexy brand's pop-up shop can still generate lines around the block, but savvy retailers are taking a more holistic approach. Digital pop-up shops can help liquidate distressed inventory worldwide, and enterprise brands have widely accepted more straightforward, easy-to-launch e-commerce platforms like Shopify to augment their omnichannel sales. The unified pop-up can be a considerable influencer event, generating a wealth of publicity and global versus local transactions.
Tried-and-true retail tactics aid a resurgence in innovation. It is finally unifying shopping across channels and improving customer experience and loyalty. It has been a long time coming.
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