Retail trends for 2018
2017 has been a tough year for retail but it also has brought with it some excellent trends and innovations.
These are some of the trends we will be seeing in 2018 and beyond.
Flexible shops
The nature of a traditional shop has already changed in 2017, but 2018 the number of traditional shops is will decrease in favour of non-traditional concepts like pop-up-shops and mobile stores.
Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI chatbots that facilitate mobile commerce are on the rise. They are continuously present during the customer journey and internationally we will see a huge rise in this in-store.
Virtual and augmented reality
We've already seen Virtual and Augmented Reality in South African stores and it's only going to increase. Huge investments are made in creating the best VR shopping experience as retailers seek to make the shopping experience more exciting for shoppers.
Voice control
Besides the widely used search commands, voice control services like Siri of Apple, Alexa of Amazon and Allo of Google will more and more be used for purchasing and payment. This is going to be a huge trend internationally, this will only hit South African shores in a few years time.
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