Alexei Agratchev, Co-Founder & CEO In this new retailing era, shoppers expect and demand seamless shopping experiences, and a number of technologies are already in-store to facilitate this journey. Smart retail solutions are making its way into smart stores with advanced analytics by harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence and IoT. When it comes to smart retail analytics solutions arena, the brand RetailNext remains synonymous with innovation and simplicity. Since opening its doors in 2007 with Alexei Agratchev at the helm as the Co-founder and CEO, the facility has been responsible for manufacturing a variety of analytics solutions for the retailers. Being the first retail vertical IoT platform to bring e-commerce style shopper analytics to brick-and-mortar stores, RetailNext is one of the pioneers in focusing entirely on optimizing the shopper experience. With a centralized SaaS platform, RetailNext automatically collects and analyzes shopper behavior data with advanced artificial intelligence capabilities and provides retailers with insights to improve the shopper experience.
Staying Ahead with AI
With RetailNext’s AI-based analytics solution, retailers can go beyond basic traffic counting by leveraging data from Wi-Fi enabled smartphones and gain powerful insights such as visit duration, unique traffic, pass-by traffic, visit frequency, and entrance path analytics. RetailNext’s analytics software and retail expertise help businesses to understand the shopper journey better, drive sales, stay ahead with AI-driven predictions, reduce theft and eliminate unnecessary costs.
RetailNext integrates with a number of physical and digital data sources inside and around a store. The company’s technology harnesses the potential of a retailer’s existing infrastructure components such as analog and IP cameras or WLAN infrastructure from major providers to make installation and activation as quick and easy as possible while delivering a plug-and-play experience.
Being one of the most robust and scalable platforms, it uses best-in-class video analytics, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth detection of mobile devices, data from point-of-sale systems, and other important sources to inform retailers about how customers engage with their stores. RetailNext’s highly comprehensive and versatile platform can be seamlessly integrated with a number of store data sources, such as promotional calendars, and staffing systems, providing retailers the ability to identify opportunities for growth, execute change, and measure success.
For generations, retailers have measured shopper traffic to calculate the most fundamental and actionable store performance metric—Conversion. But accurate traffic counting only answers the question of how many entered the store.
Over 400 retailers in more than 75 countries have adopted RetailNext's analytics software and expertise to increase sales, reduce theft and eliminate unnecessary costs
Traffic 2.0 by RetailNext is the only AI-based analytics solution offering a complete look at traffic outside the door, into and through the store, segregating shoppers from sales associates to deliver profound insights.
To gather the most comprehensive shopper insights possible, stores and shopping centers historically needed a wide variety of technologies. However, today, with RetailNext’s Aurora—an all in one sensor—retailers can harness the power of all those devices in one sensor by integrating video in HD, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Unlike traditional traffic counting, with Aurora’s intelligent capabilities, retailers can get a textured data including passersby’s data as well and expand analytics by understanding shoppers full path as they navigate the store, learning what captures engagement and what doesn’t. The device provides retailers with real-time insights about in-store service engagement and also enables to drive personalized marketing and messaging campaigns.
Aurora also comes with an intelligent interior analytics capability that enables retailers to identify friction points, optimize in-store navigation, and test layouts prior to rollout. With Aurora, they can recognize specific zones to ensure display strategies are effective and well managed while understanding the in-store opportunities by visualizing shopper behavior data through direction maps, dwell analysis, kinetic heat maps, POS video integration, and the customer demographics.
Unlike the traditional solutions that add every movement inside a store, RetailNext’s AI enabled intelligent system excludes the movement of store sales associates from traffic counts and shoppers’ in-store shopping paths with advanced Bluetooth low energy beacons (BLE). This allows businesses to exactly count, observe and measure the paths of both shoppers and staff members, and determine when shopper-associate interactions occur, how often, in what duration and the effect on conversion and other key performance indicators required for transforming the business to deliver a personal, meaningful and boundary-less shopper experience.
The Nucleus of RetailNext: The Analytics Engine
The RetailNext AI-based analytics engine is designed to analyze, and visualize massive volumes of diverse retail data. The highly intelligent software accumulates information from every store of a brand into a single place, in the cloud or on-premises, providing a real-time unified and instant view of stores and shoppers, across the retail chain. The solution designed scalable for any size enterprise not only integrates data from all locations worldwide, but also preserves critical bandwidth, and provides real-time access to store results while being secure, highly available, and compliant with applicable common standards.
RetailNext presents the analyzed information in a variety of useful formats, enabling retailers to discover anomalies and implement necessary changes for enhancing the customer experience.
The platform’s robust set of analysis tools and reports allow easily visualizing data, identifying trends, and comparing across any period. Retailers can access all this information using a variety of intuitive interfaces such as web dashboard, mobile application, canned and customizable scheduled reports, analysis and data-mining tools, real-time alerts, raw data exports, and comprehensive APIs.
Embracing the Mobile Era
Data and insights for retailers go incomplete without analytics from mobile, as it has now evolved as the critical touchpoint making shopping seamless while empowering retailers to deliver exceptional and seamless shopping experience. For retailers to compete today and into the future, they must connect and engage shoppers where they shop. The Mobile Engage smart solution from RetailNext comes with advanced machine learning algorithms and gets smarter with each and every interaction between brand and shopper allowing for increasingly, timely, relevant and personalized communication. The solution integrates seamlessly with RetailNext’s in-store retail analytics platform and can also bring in data from in-store shopping behaviors. Mobile Engage provides an app like user experience without the heavy investment of app development and can be deployed across the enterprise in about two weeks with absolutely zero drain of IT resources of a business.
The Road to Innovation
RetailNext has been empowering digital native brands with data-driven insights. The company’s clientele includes leading brands such as Brookstone, Adore Me, Casper and Marine Layer. RetailNext is the analytics partner of Allbirds, a company that designs environmentally friendly shoes that are comfort-focused and made of natural materials like merino wool, eucalyptus tree fiber and more. Allbirds uses the RetailNext solution to gain insights into how shoppers are interacting with their various products, type of products, the time taken by a shopper, and to what extent. These insights are then used to monitor product performance and improve product development. With RetailNext’s analytics and insights, Allbirds recently announced that the brand sold 1 million pairs of its wool shoes in just two years. The brand plans to open eight more stores in the US and two globally.
"RetailNext’s analytics software and retail expertise help businesses to understand the shopper journey better, drive sales, stay ahead with AI-driven predictions, reduce theft and eliminate unnecessary costs"
RetailNext was founded by a team of engineers recognizing that to stay competitive with e-commerce providers, and brick-and-mortar retailers needed business intelligence tools. The team applied their experience and deep expertise to create an analytics platform that would address the needs of retailers around the world. Today, RetailNext has developed the most advanced in-store analytics platform to address the unique needs of retailers around the world. Over 400 retailers in more than 75 countries have adopted RetailNext’s analytics software and expertise to increase sales, reduce theft and eliminate unnecessary costs. In the long run, the company envisions continuing its focus on delivering the most comprehensive retail analytics solutions while enhancing the capabilities.
