"Focus on the benefits the trends bring to your business"

Tomas Zorjan at iCore is an expert in retail and has many years of experience in creating cost-effective solutions where business processes must be solved using IT support or integration of different systems.

In the future, he mainly sees three major trends that retailers are adopting. In the industry, they are called Omnichannel, Unified commerce and Composable commerce.

- Omnichannel is probably the only one of the three that has been given a Swedish word, the idea is that the offer is the same regardless of which channel the customer buys through.

- Unified commerce means a way of working in trade that collects all data related to your customers and sales channels in one place. The goal is to offer customers a unified buying journey, where they can move seamlessly between your different channels without having to 'start over' with their purchases each time.

- Composable commerce is a more technical term that means being able to use several different systems at the same time in a trading system. They are powerful applications that communicate with each other through well-formulated APIs. It is therefore important to build a solution on a technical base that enables flexibility and that you expand the functionality by replacing individual components instead of entire solutions.

Common to all the concepts is that IT systems must in one way or another cooperate and be integrated with each other. A system that has everything and can be taken "off the shelf" does not exist, instead it is usually small niche systems and applications that must be assembled into a functioning whole. For that to be possible, the systems must communicate with each other, which means that a large amount of data flows between them. Many applications today have a significantly shorter life cycle than before and a prerequisite for replacing them, or upgrading, is a loosely coupled architecture where the systems are not connected by hard connections.

Data enables a personalized customer experience

- If we look, for example, at the concept of hybrid shopping, these are in their infancy but will in time become part of our everyday life. Hybrid shopping means that the journey to the purchase begins online, for example booking a garment that is put away in a certain store, which the customer then visits to try on and buy.

A personal customer experience can only be delivered by getting to know each customer individually, then it is possible to get close to what the customer expects in the future. Data makes this possible.

- Using all customer data and analyzing behavior is not only the best way to proceed, but the way that gives competitive advantages in both marketing and sales.

Acquisition and change of ownership

The rapid development in Retail also means that brands and store chains are merging or changing owners. When parts of an operation change hands, a lot of difficulties can arise, especially when the IT systems between the company's operations are connected. Tomas Zorjan remembers the situation of one of iCore's customers in particular.

- A large ownership group sold off an entire chain of stores where all the IT systems were assembled into one unit. Our task was to cut all connections and create a completely new IT infrastructure for the spin-off store chain. At the same time, the store chain remained open as usual. It was a tough challenge, but we solved it. An important reason why iCore was able to solve such a complex situation was thanks to the fact that iCore got into the process at an early stage and was able to help plan how the separation itself would take place.

Tips from Tomas

- Get in touch with us at iCore early on, regardless of whether it's about developing business processes or dissolving existing operations. Then we can create a solution that is both robust and flexible, while avoiding making adjustments afterwards. As a customer, you get the functionality you demand at a cost-conscious price.