No more ‘shopping’

Digital technologies will transform retailing so no one actually “goes shopping” anymore. Instead, retailers will come to you with personalised offers based on your past purchases or your analysed preferences for the future. This forecast from Amit Menipaz, eBAY’s Vice President for Vertical Experiences & Platforms, speaking at GS1’s Connect 2018 conference in June.

Amit believes tomorrow’s winners will be businesses that capture and share digital information on everything in order to create the best possible consumer experiences. “No one is going to go searching for stuff on particular sites anymore and people will be shopping all the time whether they know it or not, and businesses are just going to have to be where people are (online) in order to interact with them,” he said.

Today, at least 50% of consumers’ purchase decisions in the US are made with some form of digital assistance. Amit predicts it will be 100% globally in the next 10 years as business models are transformed to fit younger consumers’ online existence and their vastly different attitudes to owning, sharing and trading goods.

eBAY is at the forefront of using computer algorithms to instantly sort items according to buyer and seller preference, and of creating digital representation of people and their interests. “It all begins with value propositions of use to each consumer and there’s no limit to the number of ways you can put things together if you think beyond your particular product and your particular company.”

Other digital technologies are just as important to the transformation: Spatial computing where shoppers can have a virtual reality experience of whatever they might buy, and the Internet of Things with its rapidly expanding ecosystem of connected devices and objects (20 billion worldwide at last count!)