siliconindia | | April 20209Data driven intelligence helps a retailer to ensure customer loyalty and also upgrade a customer's purchasing patternty and also upgrade a customer's purchasing pattern. It is a big area where service providers are helping retail companies to achieve the desired business goals where customer gets upgraded from one loyalty segment to the other. Data is also used in product design. With the analy-sis of data one can understand one product is doing better than the other product.E-COMMERCE GIANTS LIKE AMAZON & FLIPKART ARE COMING INTO THE RETAIL SECTOR WITH THEIR PHYSICAL SHOPS. HOW WILL THIS AFFECT THE RETAIL SEC-TOR, AND WHAT COMPETITION CAN THESE GIVE TO THE EXISTING PLAYERS IN THE INDUSTRY?The whole retail is not going to shift to e-Commerce completely. Statistics say that 70 percent of the sales still happen in traditional brick & morter stores. Ama-zon and Flipkart are less than 10 percent of the volume that gets consumed by the population. I am talking about approximate numbers, but the situation is the same as I speak. But as times are changing, retail stores are also looking for online presence in order to reach more au-dience. The online and the retail presence are both going hand-in-hand. HOW HAS BLOCKCHAIN AFFECTED THE RETAIL SECTOR? One area where Blockchain can help is in the supply chain. The delivery of a product involves the change of hands until it reaches the end customer. How does one ensure that things have not been tampered? Here, Dis-tributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain) is implemented to ensure a tamper-free supply chain. There is a trace of each & every action and the system also goes through multiple verification processes. A Blockchain system en-sures clarity and transparency in operations.WHAT ARE THE MAJOR CHALLENGES FACED BY BUSINESSES IN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY?Retailers are mostly struggling with the point of sales. This has traditionally not been updated for almost 15-20 years. Same technology is being used in this segment for a long time. E-Commerce is gradually changing the ways for retail businesses. New things are getting introduced and businesses are constantly updating themselves. Rakesh Ravuri
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