The Shopper-eye view of Retail

“Customers who bought this item also bought...” One small ‘suggestion’ for a shopper, one giant ‘categorization’ for the retailers. Companies are increasingly embracing the new mantra in retail:shoppers tend to correlate items that have been considered by others. An informed recommendation during the cart-filling ritual makes all the difference. Which is why retailers are hounding for insights on recent buying behaviour. What we are witnessing here is the birth of a new frontier in the retail space. Martin Roll calls this the retailarity.
“[Retailarity is] the point where retail and machine intelligence merge to turn every environment into an opportunity for shopping. Retail should be always perceived through the shopper’s lens” – Martin Roll
While we at Qwikcilver dearly agree with him, there is – in our ‘shopper-eye view’ of the retail – another component that retailarity inadvertently encompasses: the promotions. More specifically, the strategic intent of turning shoppers into customers through gift cards – an activity that we specialize in. As a leader in driving retail sales through our Gift Card processing technology, we consider gift cards as the next big growth enabler in retail. Thanks to our experience in powering the gift card programs of some of the biggest retailing names in the Indian subcontinent, we learned what we call as ‘the holy grail of gifting’: to turn shoppers into customers through gift cards, we need to turn Gift Card into a product; one that can be sold, resold, redeemed, recommended! “Customers who bought this gift card also bought...”
Why is this important for a retailer?
Because recommending products is still a gamble. Unless, you are a specialized retailer selling category-specific items, the recommendation is very much based on grouping apples with oranges, a pair of scissors with a sack of potatoes. Gift Cards, on the other hand, lends themselves to both category-specific and category-agnostic groupings. For while gift cards are products, they do not have features! Thus, gift card recommendations can help a retailer achieve a stepper shop uplift. At Qwikcilver we are committed to enabling retailers to enhance their sales, or establish new revenue stream, through gift cards. Our Gift Card processing solution helps launch gift cards, unify gift card transactions across customer touch-points, manage other retail currencies, offer multiple channels for redemption, fulfil orders end-to-end, and more. We want to make retailarity a regularity for the retailers. Tell us your problems. Comment below.

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