(e)-commerce trends in 2014

The development of in-memory solutions and the growing power of mobile devices are pushing the pace at which requirements are developing and posing rapidly-evolving challenges for vendors and companies in retail.

In my view, the following trends will shape the future of retail this year:



1st Big Data

Big data is and will be the important challenge for innovation, competition, and productivity.
Capturing, curating, managing, and processing data and information will dominate processes. The existing business process-optimization perspective of Enterprise Resource Planning solutions will be switched to a process-based, information-dominated understanding. Making the right information available in the right place at the right time will have to be the top priority in the future. And I am sure that Enterprise Resource Planning will merge with Business Intelligence

2nd Digital payment methods

New digital payment methods and increasing use of cash systems as information providers
The potentials and opportunities for capturing and transferring information are almost endless. The fast expansion and trend of various mobile devices is paving the way for new payment methods and will open up new possibilities for retailers at the point of sale. However, retailers need intelligent concepts that will enable them to integrate this trend into their existing system landscape and garner the maximum benefit – including competitive edge.

3rd Multichannel retailing

Offering your customers a consistent quality of experience, whichever channel they use. 
As I said before, in my article e-commerce is and will not killing brick-and-mortar, the borders between online and offline are melting quicker and quicker. More and more products and categories will be sold through online stores. Quite a lot of vendors already show that a good and well matched interaction of sales channels and vendor relationships means that it is possible to sell perishable foods over the Internet. But the required processes need to be put in place first.

4rd RFID

I am not sure whether RFID will make its big step this year – but I hope so
The business case for RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) still rests upon the ability to recognize opportunity, assess the risks and to structure and implement a strategy for change that clearly identifies a favorable return on investment. Opportunities for applying RFID can be found in almost any sector of commercial endeavor and at various levels of process or service engagement. I think I will write an article about RFID as soon as I can.


And finally there are four general continually growing trends:

5th Wearables and Mobility

6th Gestural Computing

7th Intelligent Assistants

8th Channel Innovations






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