With more legacy software giants embracing cloud-based, composable commerce offerings, such as recent moves by SAP and Adobe, members of the MACH Alliance (microservices-based, API, cloud, headless) are seeking to differentiate themselves while also seeing it as validation of their model. The group says usage is growing faster in the U.S. than Europe, home to many early adopters.
As brands increasingly focus on digital sales, they emphasize streamlining operations and automating logistics through ecommerce technology to effectively manage inventory systems, ad campaigns, etc. But software alone is not enough to guarantee positive outcomes, and when mismanaged, it can even do more harm than good.
Dick’s Sporting Goods continues pushing to insource its ecommerce software, following a trail blazed by its CIO during his time at Home Depot, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The company has also centralized its ecommerce fulfillment and revamped its supply chain to speed up ecommerce deliveries.
Given rapid changes in ecommerce and growing expectations of always-on consumers, it’s no surprise that the sector is a hotbed of retail innovation, technology and investment. And a lot of it was on display at this year’s Shop.org conference in Las Vegas. Here’s a sampling of the new tech that was on display in the Innovation Lab.
While interest in omnichannel is high, execution needs significant improvement. Many retailers, even after years of implementation, still need the right software platform, process and education on how to be effective. And siloed data and legacy systems are no longer sufficient to meet the challenge.