We summarize 7 key trends from this year Big Show in New York.

As its name suggests, the Retail’s Big Show organized every year in New York by the NRF (National Federation of Retail) is the bigest industry event in US.

But the NRF show is not exclusively focused on the American market. This year show surpassed even last year's record-breaking numbers. Attendance reached 27 600 people, represented by 82 countries. The area of five football fields gathered people from retail and e-commerce industry from all over the world.

The conference was opened by Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations

What are the conclusions from NRF show? 

Some of the experts admitted that this year show lacked technological innovation. However, all the speeches at the conference were mostly about retail revolution accelerating to extend of industrial revolution.

What is so revolutionary in retail market?

Here is the selection of 7 main trends in retail industry by Pascal Podvin, CEO Compario:

1. The customer is at the center

 Cutomer becomes 'Chief Executive Customer'.

2. The disappearance of the channels

Nobody talks about the channels, they have disappeared.

3. The rise of the mobile phenomenon

It is expressed through two main messages: the showrooming settled permanently, but the transactional impact of mobile is minimal.

a. The showrooming means the behavior of customers at the point of sale, when they are using their mobile or tablet to compare prices and buy sometimes elsewhere, reducing the store to the rank of a showroom. However, the showroomers represent  only 40% of Smartphones users (majority of men between 18 and 34 years, strong purchasing power). The consequences are profound. Therefore the retailers try to be more responsive and started to adjust prices in real time. Sucharita Mulputu, from Forrester, underlined that the main goal for retailers for 2013 is to increase conversion through the improvement of the customer experience.

b. The use of smartphones continues to grow - 320 million in the United States and represents nearly 15% of digital traffic. But the new observation is that the use of the mobile only leads to very few transactions. Transcation made by mobilephones in USA reached $5.5 billion, which is only a tiny fraction of a total trade. For Susan Jurevics, from Sony US, the mobile is not yet a channel on its own rights, but a way to influence purchases (especially among young clients - 18-34)

One of the trends that is growing strong in US is "geo-fencing", that allows to send messages to mobile users that are visiting certain location (push notifications to application users in limited area such as store). 

What is interesting is that the tool becomes a competitive weapon: in your own point of sale, your competitors in the same area can try to still your clients by sending coupons or discounts to mobile users.

4. The decline in social media

The importance of social media as a transaction driver is clearly overstated. According to Sucharita Mulputu from Forrester, social media in retail should be carefully analized before taking any action, because it represents only a tiny percentage of all the transaction drivers. Facebook and Twitter are still behind overwhelming domination of the email.

5 Big Data

More than ever, this year, emphasis was placed on the importance of having accurate, complete, structured data. Indeed, ways to exploit data explode and single mistake can have devastating effects.

6 Coaching challenges

Often ignored, organizational chalenges were highlighted by many speakers. Since the many different business models are developing the problem of multidisciplinary teams arises. The objective of many retailers is to make their teams a centre of knowledge about the clients, helping them to make the right decision, to improve their shopping experience.

7 Empower the sales person

The store is important again, but with technology which, in the hands of the seller, should improve the customer experience. This means that applications must be portable and offer ease of use, in order to increase productivity and facilitate the transition of the sales force from offline world to a digital world.

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