According to Gartner, “Real-time store IoT platforms are essential for unified commerce execution in a digital business environment.”_st

Gartner Report

Marketing studies show that consumers increasingly combine their physical and digital shopping experiences. Even though brick-and-mortar shopping declining, it retains irreplaceable aspects that consumers continue to desire. Phygital thus attempts to cross the divide between the physical and digital worlds and represents the fusion point of both physical and digital commerce marketing techniques.

In its 2020 Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies report¹ Gartner states that “retail digitalization trends have accelerated because of COVID-19, challenging retailers to adopt innovations in customer processes, services and experiences, while at the same time working to optimize costs.”

Gartner explains that “Real-time store Internet of Things (IoT) platforms monitor, analyze and display store activity through dashboards using a real-time data infrastructure, via signals and alerts from real-time data sources that are available within the retail store.” Its Benefit Rating is Transformational to enable new ways of doing business accross the industry. And, moving along Gartner’s key six Hype Cycle phases, this technology now enters a more mature phase, the “Slope of Enlightenment”, before progressively reaching broader market adoption, the “Plateau of Productivity” phase, within 2 to 5 years.

Gartner further says, “As retailers continue to progress with their digital transformation, real-time store monitoring platforms will be a prerequisite for excellent data management in the store. They will also become mission-critical for digital business as retailers move toward servicing customer lifestyles, which will span other industries.”

Read Gartner’s report where you will learn:

•   Which technology to select to get increasing insights about customers’ in-store journeys and bridge the gap between digital and physical behavior analysis,
• How technologies can help enforce customers’ and associates’ social distancing, traffic control, queue management and fast order pick-up during COVID-19 pandemic,
• How real-time store IoT solutions can additionally streamline store asset management to cut costs in today’s challenging times.

¹ Gartner “Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies, 2020”, 29 July 2020, Kelsie Marian.

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