The way we shop is changing as we watch, if the stories in today’s M-Retailing newsletter are anything to go by.
Today we’re reporting on how both Ocado and Walmart are throwing themselves into voice commerce, and how Barclaycard is trialling contactless payment – and self-service – for ice cream cones. These all represent very real advances in the way customers can buy, in the experience they have while shopping. And they are important in that they should make shopping very much more easy than it has been. But while both of these advances represent significant change in the way we buy goods, these have been a long time coming. Barclaycard’s ice-cream van, after all, is marking the 10th anniversary of a payment method that’s only now becoming mainstream, while voice controlled shopping has been around for some time, but is only just being adopted beyond Amazon.
In fact some of these technologies were talked about a long time before they moved to the mainstream, as we see from our feature today on the journey towards mobile-first retail. Partly, that’s because most shoppers have been slow to adopt new ideas and new ways of doing things. But a new study suggests that may be changing, with the suggestion that buying habits are now changing from week to week. Keeping up with their demands will matter, another study suggests, since the mainstream of shoppers are now demanding the best service they can get.
Paul Skeldon is away.
