Grab and Go: Retail's Biggest Tool of Personalization

Strategy

May 28, 2022

Old-school personalized service is back in fashion. Modern retailers have never-before seen amounts of customer information, due to the advent of next-generation data collection. According to RIS News, 51 percent of retailers named personalization capabilities their top strategic priority for 2019.
So how exactly do retailers tailor the path to purchase for each individual customer? A key area of opportunity for these businesses is offering a grab-and-go application that empowers in-store customers, allowing them to select, scan, and purchase items via their mobile devices.
Per Boston Retail Partners, 60 percent of retailers offer a mobile website and 57 percent offer a mobile application. Mobile engagement already a prime area of focus for most retailers – and a reported 59 percent of customers would like to use a grab-and-go checkout service from their smartphone.
The biggest example of a company currently harnessing grab-and-go technologies to deliver better customer experiences is Amazon, the longtime retail bogeyman. Using a mix of customer tracking tools and POS software, Amazon Go stores recognize when a product is selected and automatically charge the customer’s account when they exist the store post-purchase. Since late 2016, when Go launched, Amazon boasts more than 10 Go locations, and has plans to open thousands of them well into the next decade. Simply put, if you’re a retailer, you need to beat Amazon at its own game by balancing the freedom of grab-and-go service with a touch of personalized service.

Retail’s path to harnessing grab-and-go would ideally build a path to building true shopper loyalty, a key driver of sales for any retail store. Incentivizing grab-and-go use through mobile offers of value-laden loyalty programs will make it easier for shoppers to purchase their goods and buy more recommended products based off their sales history. RIS News reports that 58 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer when they are a member of their loyalty program, with 85 percent of those people pointed to discounts and offers as a reason. These can easily be integrated into a grab-and-go application, with customers given special discounts and deals for purchasing through their mobile devices.
The potential of a grab-and-go application also goes beyond merchandising. It will maximize your existing real-time store operations suite, with key purchase and customer information leading to a more accurate forecast, which then optimizes workforce scheduling applications and leads to efficient use of labor. Although data transformations and translations across different programs could typically make integrating POS data messy, a platform like Floresight would eliminate the typical headaches and risks that come with integrations.
Currently, only 9 percent of retailers offer a grab-and-go service. It’s not too late to catch up.

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