Retailers and brands today face a double-edged sword. On one side, omni-channel retailing and proliferating customer touch points provide more opportunities than ever to engage with and sell to customers. On the other side, to meet customer expectations, companies must manage their business processes and decisions in a way that is consistent and tightly connected. This is especially true for merchandise planning, and the changes have left some retailers scrambling to meet a customer demand that is more fluid than ever.

Traditionally, wholesalers and merchants have done their seasonal planning many months in advance, beginning with sales, margin and inventory productivity targets, then developing assortment plans and seeing them through the design and product development process. Once the merchandise arrived (and either sold or didn’t sell), the plan was never revisited. This is how things have been done for decades, and it worked well enough – until recently. Today, with the explosion of customer touch points and channels across the retail landscape, merchants must be able to anticipate where their customers will want to shop with them and have the proper inventory available and in stock at that point. Since consumers are inundated with choices for where to shop, even one bad experience could lead a long-time customer to take their business elsewhere.

Retailers use video surveillance cameras for a host of reasons — everything from loss prevention to customer safety to liability protection. But with the rise of IP-based video surveillance accompanied by the advent of intelligent retail analytics, video can now be tapped as an amazing source for timely business intelligence. Still, retailers and their integrator partners need to cut through the CSI-type hype and choose reliable analytics that will work for their business.

Bartol and Andersen share their perspectives in the article below.

As CEO of a company that is working to level the playing field between online and physical retailers, I take special notice when established brands like Sears and Best Buy announce widespread store closings. Contrary to seemingly popular opinion, I don't see announcements like these as proof that retail stores are dying. I believe, in fact, we are in a cultural and economic shift that will make physical retail stronger than ever — even as it forever changes how we discover, compare and purchase products.

There is no doubt that social and mobile technologies are profoundly changing consumers' shopping habits and expectations, and the pace of this change is startling.  Even in our sluggish economy, online shopping in 2011 grew 15% over the previous year. Retail giant Amazon sold $1B through its m-commerce site and mobile applications in 2010, and that figure was forecast to double in 2011.

The Amazon Price Check app was an inevitability for the industry — smartphones eliminate information asymmetries on pricing and do so while the customer is in the store at the moment of the purchase decision.  Fighting it won't help, just like fighting digital downloading of music didn’t help the record labels.  If it wasn’t Amazon, it would have been another business, so retailers need to best Amazon’s price advantage by adding more value to the customers’ overall shopping experience. What retailers should know is that they have the advantage in this fight.