3 Key Retail Opportunities and Risks in 2020

While you put the final touches on your holiday prep, start thinking about the year to come, too. If you take the right approach, there will be plenty of chances to grow and meet evolving customer demands, even during slow seasons.

Of course, with new opportunities for growth come risks; how do you know what’s right for your store? What new tools are worth the investment? Do you need to make big changes, or are you on the right path already—and how do you know?

To help you get started, we’ve put together a how-to guide on three key retail opportunities your retail store needs to seize in 2020—and how to avoid the risks.

From pop-ups to product launch parties, in-store events give retailers a way to test out experiential retail concepts without having to permanently overhaul a store.

Shoppers have been responding well to retail events already—a study by SCORE found that 82% of shoppers attended a retail event in 2018. When asked, customers were generally interested in attending an exclusive sale or product demonstration organized by a store. Parties and competitions also catch customer attention.

Sure, 82% of shoppers attended a retail event last year, but only 58% of those shoppers are interested in attending another in the future. Clearly, some shoppers have found the events they’ve attended to be superfluous.

Retailers looking to capitalize on in-store events will have to find ways to ensure the events they’re throwing are valuable for both them and their shoppers, lest they risk burning bridges and wasting both time and money.

Pro tip: If you find events are a solid strategy for your store in 2020, make running them easier by automating what you can. Software like booxi can integrate with the right POS and take keeping track of and reminding attendees off your plate.

Start thinking about what you sell, why you sell it and who will most likely want to purchase it. As you plan your event strategy for 2020, keep in mind that whatever events you throw should be relevant to your business. A mattress store throwing a poker competition may draw curiosity the first time, but if the event doesn’t overlap with what you sell, it’s likely to attract people that aren’t interested in your product.

Concrete data helps you make the right decisions. A toy store looking to plan an exclusive sale event should consult the sales data in their POS system to find the recent top selling brands—those are the toys guaranteed to bring parents in the doors.

Meanwhile, an apparel store trying to decide on themes for seasonal launch parties could look at their store’s analytics and reports to get to know their customer base. If the store has a high number of returning shoppers but low number of new customers, the parties could include discounts for regulars who bring a friend.

Dedicate yourself to being flexible about your event strategy and set up a way for attendees to give you feedback after each event. Tweak the strategy for the next event based on both the feedback you’re getting and updated data about your store.

Big retailers experimenting with new store concepts have set up new expectations for retailers in 2020. If a potential customer is going to pick your store to shop in over the competition—or the convenience of eCommerce—then they’ll need some convincing.

Responding to this new consumer demand will look different for every retailer. It could mean the opportunity to open a second store, move to a different location, optimize your stock or tweak your layout—but whatever you do, it should be done with your customer’s experience in mind.

Is it really worthwhile to have different inventory at different store locations? Will experiential retail pay off for you? Do your customers want new experiences—or do they want more of the same, but optimized?

Diving into big (or small) changes affecting the way your store operates could pay off—or it could be a waste of time that annoys your customers. Whatever changes you make to your stores, they have to be made to respond to what you customers want (ideally backed by your data), not idle speculation.

When it comes to making decisions about your store in 2020, look to the facts: data from your POS.

Your store isn’t just the endpoint of the customer journey—it’s an advertisement meant to entice customers to come back. Think about what you sell—can you rearrange your store to better serve try-before-you-buy impulses? A pet supply store, for example, could consider centralizing a pet-friendly play area where owners can try out products and toys, or even sample treats.

If you have multiple stores, think about how you can optimize their individual experiences based on the types of shoppers in those areas. One location may focus more heavily on a certain inventory category than the other; look to your POS for data on what does (and doesn’t) sell well in each store, then optimize your store’s inventory. Layout, branding, sales and promotions—optimize each store based on what its customers are purchasing.

How customers think about your brand has changed—they expect you to be fully omnichannel and have for a few years now. Big, headline-catching experimental stores like Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab are making a splash with AI-powered commerce. The future of retail looks high-tech and connected, and in 2020, more retailers will start to move that way when upgrading and overhauling stores.

How retailers respond to these expectations will differ depending on their customer base and what they sell. No matter what kind of store, though, there is an opportunity to use technology to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Adding new technology to your store can seem like a rather daunting upfront cost. If you don’t invest in technology that’s easy for employees to learn, whatever effort you try to put into it won’t pay off as well as you’d like. If whatever tools you add to your store aren’t scalable, you’ll have a hard time replicating your success.

Retailers need to be sure they research their options thoroughly. Look for tools that support your business current and future aspirations.

If you haven’t already upgraded to a cloud-based POS system, 2020 is the year to seize that particular opportunity. Once you’ve upgraded, you can start utilizing your new cloud-enabled freedom in smart ways.

Consider embracing mobility in 2020 and equipping your sales associates with mobile POS tablets. Accept payments anywhere in the store to help customers discover what your store has to offer, eliminate lineups to pay and streamline their shopping experience.

When you’re adding products to your inventory, add informative tags, notes and images. Then, when a customer has a question in-store, your staff can quickly look up product information, recommend related products in a single tap and generally position themselves as authoritative voices that shoppers can trust.

Now more than ever, the customer is driving the direction retail is going. Customers will keep expecting retail to change constantly as their needs and wants evolve; 2020 will see retailers doing what they can to keep up.

How will you address next year’s opportunities and risks?