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This blog post was adapted from our white paper Driving Retail Transformation with Redis Enterprise. Download it for free now!
Around 10,000 U.S. retail stores closed in 2019, victims of a shift to online shopping that has accelerated in recent years. And due in part to the COVID-19 crisis, another 25,000 are predicted to shutter in 2020. Many retailers and chains of all sizes are still unprepared for these sea changes, and could face bankruptcy. Those that try to compete online face a challenging marketplace with online-first retailers establishing big leads in critical areas like speed of selection, a digitally enabled supply chain, broad product catalogs, website availability, and customer experience and personalization.
Online retailers are simplifying the shopping experience for their customers and building loyalty. As more customers shop online, foot traffic decreases and even more stores close, which drives frustrated customers online, and so on. But this vicious cycle can be broken. Brick-and-mortar retailers can compete by leveraging the right technology both online and in-store (where many customers still prefer to shop). For many retailers, the best way to implement this kind of omnichannel strategy is by embracing the cloud.
Ironically, many large physical retailers have been offering online shopping for so long that they are now being held back by their legacy in-house technology. Many of their online stores were built 20 years ago with now-aging technology and infrastructure that is more costly to manage and can throttle innovation compared to more modern digital-first competitors.
Increasingly, the answer is to build real-time applications in the cloud. Cloud-native applications are faster and more responsive than ever, which is essential for today’s consumers, who expect everything from catalog searches to customer-service interactions to happen quickly and efficiently. Just as important, the cloud is more scalable, and its pay-as-you-go pricing models can also cut costs. Why pay year-round for infrastructure capacity that you need only on Black Friday?
Beyond cloud adoption, there are many other steps retailers can take to modernize their IT infrastructures and stand out from the crowd. Download our Driving Retail Transformation with Redis Enterprise whitepaper to learn more about why you need to speed transactions to deliver a great customer experience, optimize the digital supply chain, and perfect an omnichannel approach to retailing. And you’ll also learn and how Redis Enterprise is a key component of this approach—its fast performance, low latency, high availability, linear scalability, and multiple data-persistence options help combine the power of the cloud with in-store shopping and fulfillment to flip the script on online-only retailers and turn physical locations into assets instead of liabilities.
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