Shopper Experience
04 August 2022
How ecommerce is continuing to disrupt the retail industry
Technology and personalization are reshaping shopping experiences.

Inside an Amazon Style store. (Photo via Amazon)
Technology and personalization are reshaping shopping experiences.
Inside an Amazon Style store. (Photo via Amazon)
In 2020, the total of global online sales was 16.4% of total retail sales, with ecommerce accounting for more than three-quarters of overall retail growth, and, today, 57% of global shoppers’ spend is online. Advancements in artificial intelligence and immersive technologies are fueling ecommerce growth and disrupting the retail industry, and these trends are proving that ecommerce is a force to be reckoned with. This wave of digitally-powered change will continue to drive the retail industry forward for years to come.
The democratization of ecommerce, led by platforms making advanced capabilities accessible to everyone, has been a game-changer because these competencies are no longer exclusive to retail giants. Anyone who wants to build a retail brand can leverage ecommerce platforms to create a professional-looking, branded online store, and harness the power of social networks to establish brand recognition and awareness. With the constant removal of barriers for newcomers, online creators, and micro-brands, the number of online merchants will continue to grow exponentially, along with competition and customer acquisition costs.
With that increased competition, customer retention and repeat rates have become more important than ever. Existing customers are 50% more likely to buy from a seller again, and spend on average 31% more than new customers. Additionally, it costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This cost gap between new customer acquisitions and returning buyers will grow as competition rises.
On a tactical level, what this competition is doing is driving a need for merchants to create seamless, superior personalized experiences to retain and attract customers. Advanced technologies including machine learning, augmented reality (AR) and superb logistics are essential for a zero-friction experience that minimizes steps between discovery and delivery. The rising need for sales conversions and buyer repeat rates, paired with improvements in AI and data processing technologies, will lead to hyper-personalized shopping experiences. Merchants will use datafication and machine learning to adapt their products and services in real-time to generate personalized shopping interfaces, catalogs, and even promotions for individual customers to increase the likelihood of a purchase. Utilizing cloud computing connectivity and advanced logistics, content publishers, ecommerce platforms, device manufacturers, retailers, and logistics companies will collaborate to shorten the time and reduce friction between customer intent and product delivery to a minimum.
Customer expectations for an instantaneous and seamless transaction process, powered by AI, AR, machine vision, and speech recognition, will continue to evolve the shopping experience. It won’t be long before everything – both on a screen and in the real world – is shoppable anytime, anywhere. Shoppable videos, visual search and voice assistants will make shopping even more seamless. Buyers will soon be able to see a character on TV or a person walking down the street, and, in real-time, they will be able to purchase that individual’s entire look, including clothes, shoes, accessories, and even makeup, on any of their connected screens or wearable devices. They will be able to ensure that it looks perfect on them with an AR fitting room, and receive the items within a couple of hours.
Even though online shopping surged throughout the pandemic, brick-and-mortar shopping isn’t going away, and, instead, hybrid shopping has evolved. One in four consumers choose hybrid shopping as their preferred method. People are hopping online and picking up in-store, or browsing in-store and completing the purchase online. These growing trends are here to stay. However, there will be more digitized and personalized in-store experiences. For example, buyers could use their AR glasses in-store as their virtual styling guide and shopping assistant, showing them the way to pants that match with the shirt they just picked and the aisle to go and try them on. The glasses could even offer them targeted promotions or virtually customize the product for them in real-time. With hybrid shopping, merchants will need to deliver complementary experiences for both online and in-store shopping, resulting in something greater than what could be achieved through each as a solitary strategy.
The overall shopping experience is becoming more immersive and instantaneous than ever. A seamless process of seeing a desired good, virtually trying it out, buying it, and receiving it in real-time is very close to coming to fruition. These ecommerce trends are driving the retail industry forward into new unforeseen spaces, and it’s safe to say that they will continue to shape the sector for years to come.
Oren Inditzky is the Vice President of Online Stores at Wix.
Gather AI is deploying drones to help improve accuracy and speed within logistics operations.
(Photo via Gather AI)
Think of drones being used in ecommerce, and delivery probably comes to mind first. After all, Jeff Bezos’ famed 60 Minutes appearance in 2013 left a lasting vision of flying goods.
A decade later, a startup is showing that the last mile isn’t the only part of ecommerce logistics where autonomous aerial vehicles can make an impact.
Gather AI is deploying drones inside warehouses to help companies improve the accuracy of inventory counts, free up humans from repetitive labor and even locate inventory items that managers lost in the stacks. This week, the Pittsburgh-based company was named to the Retail Tech 100 from CB Insights, adding to a number of milestones over the last several years.
Founded out of Carnegie Mellon University’s famed robotics program by a team that was funded by DARPA to develop the first autonomous helicopter, Gather AI is applying the data collection capabilities of drones to inventory monitoring and asset gathering. During PhD work at CMU, CEO Sankalp Arora pursued a question at the center of how autonomous systems might interact with surroundings: How do you make drones curious?
“They were curious about landing zones, wires, openings in buildings and moving assets because my work was funded by the Department of Defense,” Arora said. “Now, my drones are curious about barcodes, boxes, racking and labels.”
Gather AI's drones are being used across multiple verticals of commerce, such as third-party logistics, retail distribution, manufacturing and food & beverage. Ahead of the company’s commercial launch in 2021, ecommerce emerged as a particular area that was rife with problems to solve. As fulfillment centers were getting bigger, the time required for humans with clipboards to count inventory only got longer. Additionally, the logistics space faced heavy labor attrition rates and even shortages, especially in the midst of the pandemic ecommerce boom.
“The warehouses were struggling to keep up,” Arora said. “Currently, our solution provides real-time inventory monitoring for those customers in warehouses nine to 15 times faster than current operations, and it is all visible and traceable, in real-time, with live photos.”
A drone flying in a warehouse. (Courtesy photo)
The drones fly between standing racks, using technology including robotics, computer vision and deep learning alongside cameras to map environments and collect data from the shelves. They run through an iPad, which provides monitoring and dashboards to review data. In one unique challenge among many that the company had to solve, there is no access to WiFi inside warehouses due to the metal construction, so the iPad and drones are connected.
The advancement of drones is an intriguing development for technologists, but for the people who run logistics operations, the question of their utility ultimately comes down to how it will help their business.
In some cases, these drones have been able to locate items after humans lost track of them. The company found 25,000 lost pallets for customers in 2022.
“It's misplaced inventory. It's not where it's supposed to be. It's somewhere in the warehouse. And as a result, if you get an order for that inventory, you don't get to pick it because you don't know where it is,” Arora said. “Now, we've found those and know exactly where they are, [so] they can fix their warehouse management system and start picking.”
That’s just one of the ways that the company said that drones improve inventory. Gather AI identified the following uses for warehouse drones, with stats from customers:
To fuel growth, Gather AI raised $17.5 million to date from investors, including a $10 million Series A in 2021, and now has 30 employees. It is looking to continue to grow not only its customer base, but the number of facilities it is flying through for those current clients. Each time the company started with a company in one facility, it has added others from that same company. Now, it is expanding capabilities to expand visibility and traceability through the warehouses in order to function as a complete network.
With customer deployments and results to report, Gather AI will be heading to Promat 2023 and the IWLA Convention in March.