An M-Commerce Future?

It’s a little over a year since Burberry unveiled its high-tech flagship in central London. This was a store that boasts huge numbers of iPads, a massive screen on which fashion shows can be streamed and RFID tags onevery in order to trigger content that would appear on the mirrors in the fitting rooms. Fantastic, except that whenever you happen to walk into this store, the well-heeled shoppers are looking at the garments, rather than the many screens.

And Burberry is on the top of the pile as far as in-store, interactive technology is concerned.  Many retailers have followed the iPad route and seemingly overlooked one pretty major detail: It’s one thing to have small screens in a shop, another to have content that will prove engaging and which will add to the experience that a shopper enjoys.

The plain and somewhat unpalatable fact for retailers that think they’ve got in-store technology wrapped up is that they probably haven’t. Most shoppers would rather look at the products that they came into a store for instead of staring at screens that are intended to tell them about things that might be in the shop were it bigger, but are in fact not.

Fashion retailer AllSaints recognized this shortcoming pretty early on and the iPads that once graced its shops have now been removed. So what does all of this mean? The answer is that the store of tomorrow may well look like a pre-iPad store of yesteryear. There will be technology in our stores, of course, but it seems probable that it won’t have the same high profile it currently does. Indeed, the concentration may well be on the screens that we all carry around with us in the shape of our mobile phones.

This is the way ahead and the smartest retailers are already reacting to what increasingly looks like an m-commerce future.  

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A based in London and then Dusseldorf. He lives and works in London.