Role of IoT in Retail Digital Transformation

Digital transformation in the retail industry isn’t the new concept now because retailers are already doing so many experiments with connected & intelligent devices to offer the latest services to customers. They reguarly try to create a advanced digital ecosystem to enter new markets and reshape the business trends.

One of the best digital transformation technologies is IoT (Internet of Things) that offers retailers an opportunity, mainly in three areas: the supply chain, customer experience, and new channels and revenue streams.

IoT has two roles inretail transformation. It is working for customer benefits, and another, it focuses on offering you operational benefits.

What benefits customers can attain from the retail transformation:

1. Contactless Checkout

The most remarkabletransformation in the retail industry is contactless checkout that aims to provide a user-friendly shopping experience to your customers. When they visit your online retail stores, it lets your customers avoid queues and kiosks by converting their smartphones into a POS. There is no need to download the mobile app even. It offers an advantage of contactless payments with a full-self service experience.

“COVID has increased the need for autonomous checkout and skyrocketed the technology solutions after having the demand from retailers. There are lot of retail technology service providers have this chance to figure out the need and launch according to the retailer and customers needs. Caper is one of the example, according to a news published at zdnet.

What to like is about the autonomous checkout that allows people to scan the product automatically, meaning customers have no need to do physical scanning of objects from any expert.

2. Smart Mirrors

The reason for transformation in the retail industry can be Smart Mirrors, also known as Magic Mirrors. It may be used in the bathrooms of high-end hotel rooms. The presence of a television remote control often gives surprise to guests. When the power button is pressed, a tiny television screen appears “magically” inside the mirror. This form of solution eventually can be found in retail, where it allows simple ads to be shown on mirrors to impress the shoppers.

For example, to help shoppers dress virtually, there are intelligent augmented reality softwares in market that allows customers to check how they are looking without going into a dressing room. Customers can try as many clothes virtually to examine their looks before making a purchase from retailers.

3. Barcode Scanning

It is possible for customers to scan a barcode on a garment to know its information. They can also check different sizes or colors on retailers’ eCommerce sites to improve their personal experience.

Apart from that, customers can use wearable devices or their smartphones to check the product’s reviews, or read comments about products on social media, and scan much more information about the item.

4. Digital Coupons

The major IoT role in retail transformation is to give customers’ seamless shopping experience by hook or crook. With an IoT- based system, customers can easily access personalized digital coupons after entering the store. It helps them save more according to the actual price of items.

Every day, retailers add coupons and give discount options to customers according to their marketing strategy because it helps them increase customer loyalty and provides retailers a way to  make aboost in their sales conversion rates.

5. Real-Time Content

Content is the real king. If you don’t show products with relevant specifications or descriptions, your customer will predict that you don’t have etiquette for doing business or don’t know what they are looking for.

The reason to visit your retail website is to buy products from the comfort of homes. As a retailer, if you don’t consider customers’ changing dynamics, how they will connect or shop from your brands in the future. Including the IoT-connected digital signage as the retail transformation is necessary. It allows you to publish the content to stores in real-time and lets you customize it based on specific regions, cities, or stores.

6. Smart Shopping Carts

Recently, Amazon has introduced its new shopping smart cart, namely The Amazon Dash Cart, which has a touchscreen feature that enables customers to access a scanner for coupons and Alexa shopping lists.

There will be a QR code that you can find in the Amazon app. When the cart is available, you will be able to start using it after making a simple sign-up. After Sign in, you can place your bags in the cart and start shopping. After completing this process, you can simply exit from the store and receive a receipt on your email, which will be shared by Amazon.

Operational Benefits

Automated retail technologies such as automated checkout, drones, and robots help the retail industry experience such a big transformation. Above, we already have discussed automated checkouts, and you may remember that feature is mainly designed to give benefits to customers. But what about operations benefits?

Smart Shelves

There are hundreds of thousands of products, which the retailers have to display in their e-store because your customer wants more variety, whether it is shoes, clothes, home appliances, kitchen appliances, baby products, makeup, or anything.

Yet, is it possible for you to provide each item all the time? Of course not, you buy products for your customers as per your budget. You decide how much quantity you have to give them. You need to determine when the product will go out of stock and when the product will show available. If you display your products’ availability on a manual basis, it will take weeks or months. To solve these issues, big companies think to bring transformation in the retail sector by providing you an option of Smart Shelves.

Thus, Smart Shelves work based on RFID technology. It can be RFID readers, antennas, or RFID tags that enable you to track inventory automatically in retail stores. It helps you maintain inventory levels and help your customers know that your product is out of stock. In case of non-availability, either they can make a purchase of another product or visit someday again to buy that product.

Smart Robots

Smart robots also work automatically to help in areas ranging from product assembly, stock replenishment to hazardous materials handling. Due to the drastic increasing rate of COVID-19, many retailers have started using automation in their store operations.

One of the automation practices is smart robots that give you assistance for order picking or provide you inventory visibility to optimize your business operations better. Such robots can identify your customers’ behavior patterns and capture more granular data about the products that are available on the shelves.

Some advantages of including smart robots in your retail digital transformation journey are, it gives you more accuracy and efficiency while managing inventory. You can track stock levels, product movement, product placement in real-time. It is ideal for correct and accurate tagging, stocking, and pricing of products.

Additional Operational Benefits to Consider:

• Smart Packaging that monitors the age or freshness of perishable goods.
• Smart Price Tags that you can change in real-time and based on trends and other demands.
• Sensors help you check the age of perishable items and their quality. It notifies the suppliers that they have a need to give either discount to customers or inventory replenishment.

Read More: Role Of IoT in Retail Digital Transformation

Implementation of Load Testing With Agile Approach

Performance is a measure of quality. Your customers expect high performance from your web application. In case of slow response on your site, the customer will feel that your web application is not working correctly.

To understand the bottlenecks that affect the performance of the web applications, product owners must need to go through the performance profile of their applications. To fix the bottlenecks to improve the performance scale and site’s speed, one must consider load testing services within an agile environment.

Load Testing Helps To Identify?

• The sustainability of the application concerning high user load.
• The applications’ maximum operating capacity.
• It helps to understand whether the current infrastructure is enough to operate the application.
• A number of concurrent users supported by the application or how many users can access the website.
• Scalability of the application.

Implementation of Load Testing With Agile Approach

One of the primary intentions of Agile is it enables us to manage change effectively in both external and software functionality.

It allows us to streamline the development of quality software. One of the essential factors of an organizational Agile is that it supports teams to produce a usable version. This load testing approach supports you to put tech writers, QA, and Devs on one page, and in the case of performance testing in Agile, it helps you design a resource and make you responsible for the testing. The other fact is all stakeholders, including those who are business members, have an allowance to include in this process.

Read More: Load Testing Implementation with Agile Approach

Role of AI in Test Automation

Artificial Intelligence is a diverse field of computer science concerned with developing smart machines able to perform tasks that mainly require human intelligence. AI makes it easier for machines to perform human-like tasks. It allows machines to make adjustments to new inputs and helps them learn from experience.

Due to the demand for automation for the testing processes and solutions in order to give seamless experiences to customers, the growth of the automation testing market will increase with cutting-edge AI technologies for software testing environments. In the coming years, we can see more use of artificial intelligence in software testing due to its capability of reducing the test life cycle. It can be used in several aspects of testing, including functional testing, regression testing, automation testing, and performance testing.

Benefits of AI in Software Testing

AI in software testing aims to make testing more efficient and smarter. Both machine learning and AI use reasoning and problem-solving techniques to improve and simplify the processes of testing.

It saves a lot of time compared to manual testing and supports the teams while focusing on complicated tasks.

 It is essential to choose AI and machine learning for test automation because it gives you more flexibility during the entire testing process.

You can implement more than thousands of test cases in one go, which is honestly not possible through manual testing.

Read More: Automate Software Testing with AI

Saas, PaaS, and IaaS Explained – Examples, Comparison and Scenarios

Due to the rise of modern and more innovative technological trends, cloud computing becomes an excellent substitute for the centralization of computer services under one server.

If you’re the person who is planning to move your business to the cloud or ready to acquire the benefits that cloud computing offers, you need to understand the three service models of cloud computing like Saas, Paas, and Iaas solutions, their comparisons, testing process, and much more information in detail.

Saas

Saas refers to Software as a Service that is a software licensing and delivery model in which software licensing is provided based on subscription, and it is hosted from the center.

Saas (Software as a Service) is also popular as cloud application services, “software plus services” by Microsoft, and an “On-demand software” that is used by businesses in the cloud market.

PaaS (Platform as a Service)

Paas in cloud computing is a Platform as a Service that is a complete development and deployment environment with resources in the cloud, which allows you to deliver everything from simple to sophisticated cloud-based apps.

Like Saas, you need to purchase the PaaS from the cloud service provider and pay-as-you-go basis, and finally, you can access the resources over a secure internet connection. PaaS involves infrastructure that are servers, storage, and networking, including development tools, middleware, database management systems, business intelligence (BI) services, and more.

IaaS

IaaS is defined as Infrastructure as a Service, an instant computing infrastructure supplied and managed over the internet. It offers a standardized way of obtaining on-demand computing capabilities over the web. Its resources involve networks, storage, processing power, and virtual private servers.

IaaS in cloud computing is one of the types, including platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless. Unlike PaaS, you will pay for what you use. There is no worry of buying and managing own physical servers and other data centre infrastructures.

Read More: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS Advantages