Retail Trends In 2017: The Year Of Evolution

The trends this year retailers really need to focus on won’t be around the hottest new technologies or latest fads. Instead, companies that focus on delivering consistent, engaging customer experiences will set themselves up for long-term success. But in order to run your business successfully and provide the brand experiences shoppers expect, you must first have the right foundational systems in place.

I once had a sports coach who would constantly say to get the basics right, and the rest will follow. To build a true omnichannel brand experience, retailers need to get back to the basics—focus first on making sure the business has the right technology foundation in place. This involves consolidating their core systems and initiating a one-system approach. With a one-system approach, your back-end Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and order and inventory management systems will reside on one platform. You’ll get a single source of the truth for customer, order and inventory data in real-time, making that data available to all existing and future front-end, customer-facing systems.

Retailers that have properly set their foundation are now ready for the next step in their evolution, including executing on these key trends shaping up in 2017.