Complete 360-Degree Solution Empowers Retailers to Better Respond to Industry’s Shopper-Led Disruption
NEW YORK, 2018-Jan-17 — /EPR Retail News/ — Today (Jan. 14, 2018 ), RetailNext Inc., the worldwide expert and market leader in IoT smart store retail analytics for optimizing shopper experiences, announced a variety of expanded capabilities and functionalities, including a world’s first retail edge sensor with onboard deep learning artificial intelligence and the industry’s widest field of view, enhanced retail analytics software benefits, and the further development of a complete partner ecosystem to solve for retail brands’ biggest challenges and opportunities. RetailNext is highlighting its comprehensive suite of solutions and partner ecosystem at NRF 2018, Retail’s Big Show & EXPO, presented by the National Retail Federation in New York City, today, January 14, through January 16.
“Long established as the industry’s de facto standard in retail analytics solutions, RetailNext is proud to further advance its smart store solutions built to empower retailers to be better, more shopper-responsive retailers,” said Alexei Agratchev, co-founder and chief executive officer of RetailNext. “RetailNext’s suite of SaaS solutions, its groundbreaking Aurora sensor, its proven retail expertise and its powerful portfolio of technology partners position the company to extend its market leadership position.”
Expanded software capabilities eliminates guesswork
New for 2018, RetailNext has introduced new performance dashboards and other software enhancements into its SaaS platform, empowering retailers to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of store management with predictive and actionable insights. The new Performance Dashboard allows for easy comparison of in-store performance against any past period, including day, week and month, and permits real-time tracking toward the achievement of current performance goals.
“In this shopper-led retail revolution, it’s important for stores to respond nimbly to the needs of shoppers and deliver the exceptional shopping experience every customer deserves,” said Bridget Johns, head of customer experience and marketing at RetailNext. “Being able to benchmark your current position against both your own goals and the performance of peers within your organization and industry provides an understanding of the opportunities available to improve store performance.”
RetailNext’s Performance Dashboard utilizes an artificial intelligence platform that incorporates multiple data sources, including historical shopper traffic trends and relevant weather data, to forecast upcoming store traffic and other key performance metrics. Doing so allows store management to properly align staffing levels to peak shopping periods and corresponding store key performance indicators, all the while maintaining efficient inventory levels and optimizing in-store promotions.
Moreover, the RetailNext analytics platform condenses actionable insights to deliver automated, prescriptive remedies tailored specifically to improve a store’s business processes, visual merchandising, shopper satisfaction and more.
“RetailNext has expanded upon its platform capabilities to provide prescriptive recommendations based on each store’s current and real-time data, as well as its projected and forecasted opportunities,” added Johns, “freeing up the time of store managers and associates to get out of the back office and onto the selling and service floor where they can make a real difference.”
Aurora v2 sensor – industry’s widest field of view and a world’s first with onboard AI
Unveiled at The Big Show, the Aurora v2 all-in-one sensor provides the industry’s widest field of view and floor coverage, reducing stores’ hardware footprints and deployment costs, and minimizing the impact to stores’ aesthetic design. Like its predecessor introduced in 2016, Aurora v2 features simple plug-and-play installation, requiring no on-site, in-store servers. All retail analytics, including deep learning, occurs onboard the device, at the edge, and data is transmitted in real-time to the RetailNext cloud, enabling brands to collect and share powerful insights across every store across the enterprise.
“The wide field of view of the Aurora v2 sensor affords retailers an economically viable method to have complete floor coverage of a store,” said Arun Nair, co-founder and chief technology officer of RetailNext, “and, in turn, makes shopper full path analyses and other advanced analytics projects more feasible. It’s precisely those projects that enable retailers to develop a deeper understanding of in-store shopping behaviors and allows them to produce differentiated in-store shopping experiences.”
Aurora v2 is the first edge device to incorporate deep learning-based artificial intelligence onboard, in the device, empowering retailers to receive store-specific insights in an affordable manner. With RetailNext’s advanced human activity recognition software, retailers can benefit from Aurora’s deep learning capabilities to measure shopper and sales associate behaviors, including picking up of products, trying products on, taking or moving products or anything else a retailer would like to determine.
“The more retailers know about what’s happening in store, the better,” continued Nair, “and Aurora v2’s deep learning abilities allow retailers to do just that, automatically and at scale, over time, freeing up valuable resources to be allocated to shopper service and care.”
Partner ecosystem expands in breadth and depth
At retail’s Big Show, RetailNext is highlighting its continually growing, vibrant ecosystem of strategic and technology partnerships, as well as IT system integrators, with demonstrations incorporating customers UNTUCKit, Bose, Cos Bar, Allbirds, b8ta and Lolli and Pops.
Integrating store operations with merchandising, RetailNext showcases how retailers ensure the right product is at the right place at the right time, and features Acuitas Digital – an alliance with BT, Intel, SATO Global Solutions, Nexgen Packaging and Valmarc Corporation – and its solutions for improving inventory visibility and management by measuring product and shopper movement on a single platform.
Additionally, RetailNext is previewing a new partnership with Facebook, with a beta initiative available to select retailers that provides aggregated and anonymized shopper demographic and behavioral data, empowering brands to better design more engaging in-store shopping experiences. Whether at the geographic-level, store-level or throughout an entire chain, retailers can better understand key demographic and behavioral attributes about store visitors as a complement to the in-store shopping behaviors captured through the RetailNext platform with every shopping journey.
“Without question, shoppers have ushered in a new era in retailing, and their collective expectations for easy, convenient, fun and friction-free shopping experiences rise year after year,” emphasized Johns. “IoT technologies and smart store solutions from RetailNext and its partners are solving for retail stores’ most pressing opportunities, proving the shopper-centered smart store is a today thing, not a tomorrow thing.”
Professional solutions see strategies through to execution
Long recognized as a retail industry thought leader, RetailNext is leveraging its own in-house retailing expertise with the talent, solutions and capabilities of its partner ecosystem to develop a full suite of professional consulting services.
“Strategic consultation is natural expansion of our existing advanced analytics practice,” continued Johns, “where we couple RetailNext’s extensive knowledge of retail and the in-store technology landscape with the right technology partners to complete custom engagements and studies. RetailNext’s additional professional services solutions will feature deep, consultative engagements utilizing the most appropriate partners in its 360-degree ecosystem to help retailing brands define and ultimately execute upon go-forward strategies.”
About RetailNext
The first retail vertical IoT platform to bring e-commerce style shopper analytics to brick-and-mortar stores, brands and malls, RetailNext is a pioneer in focusing entirely on optimizing the shopper experience. Through its centralized SaaS platform, RetailNext automatically collects and analyzes shopper behavior data, providing retailers with insight to improve the shopper experience real time.
Nearly 400 retailers in over 75 countries have adopted RetailNext’s analytics software and retail expertise to better understand the shopper journey in order to increase same-store sales, reduce theft and eliminate unnecessary costs. RetailNext is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. Learn more at www.retailnext.net.
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Media Contact:
Ray Hartjen
RetailNext, Inc.
(925) 895-5441
ray.hartjen@retailnext.net
SOURCE: RetailNext, Inc.