The future of commerce promises highly personalized and frictionless shopping experiences designed purposefully to boost customer loyalty, operational efficiencies, and store profitability.

Progressive retailers are setting the pace by adopting cutting-edge digital technologies and omnichannel business strategies, reshaping the commerce ecosystem. These advancements, enhanced and delivered through automation and AI, offer consumers greater freedom and flexibility while also improving employee satisfaction through more efficient, end-to-end workflows. Ultimately, no matter the locus of the shopping experience — online, at a kiosk, or in a physical retail store — the goal in retail, as it has always been, is to delight the customer and make it easy for them to keep coming back for more.

Here are Five Ways to Fulfill a Frictionless Future in Commerce:

Keep it Moving: Automating workflows from warehouse to delivery

Automating the movement of goods into, within, and out of warehouses, as well as distribution (B2B) and fulfillment (B2C) centers, is crucial to maintaining the uninterrupted flow of products and goods to consumers worldwide. Thanks to a steady stream of new warehouse automation and robotics solutions, augmented by AI, products of all kinds now move through global supply chains with ever-increasing volume and velocity.

While still in the early stages, the market for warehouse automation is poised to grow to $41 billion by 2028, according to Jabil’s analysis based on available market data. Robotic picking arms, sortation systems, and fully autonomous robots serve critical functions as part of automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS) while autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and humanoids use advanced computer vision, sensor technologies, and LiDAR navigation systems to work alongside human collaborators. These robots offer ample opportunities to improve operational productivity, efficiency, and safety by eliminating repetitive manual tasks.

Looking beyond the warehouse, fully autonomous vehicles and drones are changing the way retailers reach customers directly from their stores or fulfillment centers. Commercializing these next-generation warehouse automation and last-mile delivery systems requires the coordination of multiple technical workstreams in parallel, including expertise in wireless communications, engineering, RF architecture, antenna design, battery and power management, computer vision systems, AI, LiDAR, global supply chain, and volume manufacturing.

Eyes on the Aisle: Transforming in-store experiences

Collecting real-time insights on store conditions — and correlating that vital data with actionable business decisions — is no small feat. That’s why retailers continuously employ proven as well as more emergent technologies to better understand what’s happening within the aisles and shelves of their stores that will make shopping more seamless and satisfactory.

Multipurpose, autonomous robots from Badger Technologies (a product division of Jabil) are increasingly familiar sights roaming the aisles of grocery and home-improvement stores to detect missing, mispriced, and misplaced products while expediting replenishment of the most sought-after products. Additionally, these robots capture the most up-to-date information about customer brand choices, product preferences, and shopping habits to optimize shopping experiences.
 

In-store autonomous robots work seamlessly with digital displays, RFID-enabled tags, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fixed cameras, sensors, and other cloud-based web services to ensure that what takes place in the aisle is connected transparently with other in-store services and back-end processes.
 

Seamless integration with retailers’ e-commerce, mobile shopping, and curbside pickup offerings is quickly becoming a standard requirement for any omnichannel or unified sales strategy.
 

The ability to help retailers transform their stores into intelligent digital assets requires a deep understanding of the retail landscape and longstanding relationships with retail technology solutions providers focusing on automating and digitizing operations. This results in more personalized shopping experiences while reducing operational burdens on retail employees so they can spend more quality time with customers.
 

Aggregated analytics and AI-driven insights also play pivotal roles in helping retailers improve store operations and profitability. Up- to-the-minute insights keep retailers, and their vendors, aligned on planogram compliance by assuring proper product assortment and shelf allocations. “State of the store” and the “state of the product” insights are both critical to retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers.

New Ways to Pay: Frictionless checkout

Giving customers ready access to all the products they want is a major first step to reinforcing satisfaction, which can too easily be undone, in an instant, if presented with long laborious checkout processes. That’s one reason for the rapid rise in self-service checkouts and smart shopping carts that function like a moving check-out machine. According to Research and Markets, the global smart shopping cart market is estimated to reach $1.8 billion this year with projections to $5.7 billion by 2028.

Smart grocery carts continue to leverage the latest technical enhancements, broadening their overall functionality and delivery of features. High performing optics technology enables ever-improving ‘vision’ capabilities driven by sensors, scanners, display interfaces, while AI and machine learning technology tally items as they are placed in the cart, letting shoppers skip checkout lines altogether. Some carts come equipped with biometric sensors, along with displays of ready-to-use coupons and related sales offers, while others feature built-in scales for weighing produce and mobile-phone charging ports for added convenience.
 

Moving forward, the cashierless checkout process must be designed to be fast and easy for shoppers. Designing and deploying these highly advanced solutions can be an extremely tedious and complex undertaking.

Tech-enabled cashiers, self-service checkouts, point-of-sale (POS) systems, and smart connected payment terminals require diligent planning and attention to detail. For most, this goal necessitates customized solutions tailored for specific merchant needs, which places an ever-increasing demand to empower companies across the payment acceptance ecosystem with highly secure and scalable payment acceptance solutions, integrating technologies like biometrics and digital payments.

Small and medium-sized business (SMBs) have become critical to the strategy for multiple bank, acquirers and payment processors as their businesses are forced to evolve beyond payment processing to providing full POS solutions, including a suite of services and capabilities for workforce management, inventory management and broader financial services. Leaders in this industry segment include companies like, Clover-Fiserv, Square, SumUp, and Shopify.
 

The ability to deliver exceptional in- store experiences requires a complete understanding of an expanding set of technologies, and mastery of hardware and software design and development. This includes PCBA, mechanical integration, user interfaces, full system integration and testing, payment transactions, EMV compliance, PCI certification, complex supply chain management, and more.
 

On the Go: Added convenience with direct-to-consumer solutions

The notion of “grab and go” shopping is taking on new meaning as retailers seek increasingly creative ways to address their customers’ evolving buying preferences and spending habits. Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology combines computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning to enable shoppers to enter a store, grab what they want, and leave quickly without stopping to check out.

While most of the current “grab and go” pilots are being deployed in traditional grocery environments, it’s important to follow the emergence of the next generation of edge-retail solutions. Smart kiosks, automated boutiques, and autonomous vending machines are starting to pop up everywhere as they become an increasingly important part of a modern brand’s omnichannel digital-services portfolio.

These highly tailored brand experiences are intended to drive customer satisfaction and brand loyalty by placing highly relevant merchandise in the immediate path of target customers. For instance, consider the appeal of an intelligent refreshment system that gives consumers increased beverage ordering autonomy using AI-powered machine-crafted coffee and drinks. Not only does this type of solution offer seamless and fast around-the-clock drink delivery, it also provides high degrees of customer personalization. Highly convenient grab-and-go solutions also typically include digital pre-order capabilities plus one-touch ordering with saved favorites.
 

Autonomous vending machines and smart kiosks leverage real-time data insights and “at-site” sensing capabilities to further amplify and personalize purchasing. These digitized solutions continually learn, adapt, and ultimately anticipate customer behavior and preferences, while ensuring consistent product quality. With that said, gathering customer information from edge-retail devices requires expertise in machine learning, AI, and predictive analytics, not to mention a fundamental understanding of the underlying IT infrastructure.

Automated vending technology is evolving quickly to engage customers with touchscreen controls, video, audio, scent, and gesture-based interactions. Keeping pace with developments in self-service technologies is a complex undertaking, which is why it’s crucial for retail brands to devise and deploy a complete yet complex mix of technologies to ensure seamless, convenient, on-the-go transactions.

Stay Connected: Prioritizing customer communications

The necessity for retailers to create and nurture a direct communications channel with existing and potential customers cannot be overstated. Digital brands have set a high bar for continuous interactions with customers in meaningful ways by sharing relevant brand messaging and ancillary services that build loyalty while reinforcing “customer stickiness.”

Effective brand communicators extend product narratives well beyond the point of purchase to share useful tips, reminders, and ideas for product add-ons, upgrades, and additional purchases. While mobile communications are the primary conduit of these ongoing connections, retailers also need to determine how best to deploy broadcast messaging at the device, group, and network levels.
 

The ability to communicate directly with consumers based on product consumption is an excellent way to improve customer engagement, reinvigorate lagging product interest, and expand product usefulness. Connected home products with auto-replenishment functionality utilize machine learning, sensors, data analytics and cloud-based services to help shoppers — and retailers — better predict product re-ordering routines.
 

As demand for home-inventory management solutions increases, retailers are extending their connected home and smart packaging strategies beyond grocery items to include auto-replenishment of home care, personal care, pet care, and a wide variety of other home staples.

While there are different ways to deploy an auto-replenishment strategy, in-depth technology expertise and experience is required across the primary building blocks, including connected devices, consumable packaging and smartphone apps used to select and monitor auto-replenishment service levels and thresholds.