For four days each year, thousands of retail influencers, investors, Wall Street analysts, tech companies, and industry visionaries flock to Las Vegas for Shoptalk. Shoptalk brings together leaders who cut through the noise to define the future of retail. With travel bans lifted, this year’s event was back to being in person and built around the theme “Retail’s Big Reunion.”
This year’s Shoptalk returned with a bang. The top 2022 themes included emerging retail technology, how physical stores are transforming, and the evolution of customers over the past few years. One breakthrough technology that addresses all three is autonomous retail.
As a featured sponsor, Amazon Pay discussed ways to go beyond the checkout button to build a customer-obsessed experience. These included Amazon Pay’s Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment, and Amazon’s new exciting Just Walk Out technology. If you missed the big event, or you just want to relive the magic, here are the highlights from Shoptalk 2022 to keep you in the know and make you feel like you were right there with us.
Shoppers want more convenient experiences
Today’s consumers have come to expect constant innovations toward frictionless shopping experiences. Autonomous retail is the new frontier — using visual data and sensors to track and manage the entire shopper experience from entrance to exit. It’s both contactless and checkout-less.
To explain how retailers can adapt to new consumer preferences, Adam Nadeau, Senior Business Development Manager for Just Walk Out at Amazon, presented one of Amazon’s latest innovations: Just Walk Out.
“What if there was no checkout?”
Just Walk Out technology by Amazon allows shoppers to enter a store, get what they want, and get going, making it completely checkout-free. Customers pay using their cards, their phones, or the new Amazon One — a personalized technology that scans your unique handprint — at various checkpoints.
The technology is built on data from Amazon’s millions of real-world customer transactions and backed by Amazon’s security, reliability, and technical support. This tech increases scalability for stores, giving them the ability to handle an unlimited volume of customers without constant management.
Going beyond the checkout button
Customer obsession is Amazon’s first principle. Competitors are just a click away, so Amazon Pay allows merchants to optimize their checkout experience and remove friction. As a leadership principle, customer obsession can help build an experience that goes beyond the checkout button. Customer-centered innovations include:
Streamlining checkouts to make them faster
Seventeen percent of all cart abandonments are solely because the customer feels the checkout is complicated [1]. Even the belief that checkout is complicated can annoy and frustrate consumers. The fewer steps to checkout, the better for customers. Payment buttons like Amazon Pay’s can speed up transactions for customers by up to 49%, because customers don’t have to input their shipping address, billing address, and phone number — a huge barrier to conversions for many businesses[2].
Using payment buttons your customer recognizes
Shoppers like what’s convenient, what’s familiar, and a brand they already know and trust. Customers are more likely to make a purchase with a vendor they already know and use. The familiarity, security, and brand trust make checkout quicker and the barrier to entry low.
Freeing them from making a new account
Shoppers are more likely to abandon their cart if they have to create an account at checkout. Research shows that the average abandonment rate is now 70%, with 24% resulting from a site asking users to create a new account. To get customers to checkout, the experience has to be painless, fast, secure, and simple.
Safeguarding their information
Security concerns make customers less likely to try new forms of payment or share their financial information on a new site.
To help alleviate this, Amazon Pay recommends making sure potential and current customers know:
● What information you collect.
● What that information is used for.
● Who has access to their data.
● How that data is being protected.
● And how shoppers can revoke that access.
Shoptalk highlighted the new ways businesses are leveraging exciting new technologies to give customers more of what they want: faster, easier, secure checkouts they know they can trust. Ready to start transforming your customer experience with Amazon Pay?
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