Online shopping has become part and parcel of our lives today. From stationery stores to traditional shops and apparel outlets, most businesses have undergone a thorough digital transformation to facilitate various purposes – whether it is to meet customers' expectations, to retain customers, or simply to maintain a ‘modern’ image of their business. Despite this massive transition to online shopping, physical stores are, even today, used as hubs for delivering unified commerce. To stay relevant among customers, it is essential for retailers to elevate their customer experience, operate efficiently and adapt to the changing market scenario. 

To provide unified commerce, it has become imperative for retailers to adopt instruments and technologies to achieve digital agility in the physical marketplace. In such conditions, retailers need to create intelligent stores to better connect to the digital world. 

Smart stores are essentially brick-and-mortar stores that have been established using innovative technologies like digital payments and voice commerce - thus delivering a contactless shopping experience to customers. These stores deliver their service with the help of smart devices, apps, and web and augmented reality applications in physical stores. With the advent of intelligent technologies like touchless shopping and automated on-shelf forecasting, customers can enjoy a seamless in-store shopping experience, much like online shopping. Thus, there has been an increase in the number of smart stores in recent times. 

Moreover, when any physical store can be converted into a smart store, it provides the store with multiple smart features such as smart billing, a digital cashier, a real-time dashboard, and more. Additionally, this dashboard also provides insights into multiple areas of business, including records and data of inventory that can tremendously help a business enhance productivity and bring in profits. 

Retailer Challenges That Smart Stores Can Solve

There are some challenges that retailers face in today's ever-changing market dynamics, and these challenges can be addressed by smart stores. Here are some of them: 

Contactless Discovery and Online Payments: When physical stores are transformed into smart stores, customers can easily access the items available at a store through an online platform and make a purchase with the help of digital payments. 

Real-time Consumer Data: The significant advantage of using Smart Store solutions is that as business owners, we can keep track of real-time data that includes buying behavior, highest category sold, slow-moving items, performing brands, and various other product-level metrics. Such data enables shop owners to plan their inventory as per the ongoing purchase trends and improve their business.

Smart Shopping for Walk-in Customers: Contactless billing and a smart checkout process can ease the customers’ offline shopping experience. It involves services like generating digital bills on the mobile phone, one-click payments to reduce the checkout time, and placing digital orders in advance with an option to pick up the deliveries from the store.

Smart stores provide a new and personalized shopping experience for offline shoppers. Various companies are exploring the different capabilities of sound waves, popularly known as voice tech, to foster new retail experiences for customers. With the help of this contactless technology that is not dependent on internet connectivity, simply speaking to a device can facilitate a user to make contactless payments and enquire about the product's availability in a store. Today, consumers are looking for an experience beyond digital/UPI payments. Thus, the evolution of smart stores can be the key to unlocking a plethora of new sets of user experiences using technology.