Challenges & future trends of retailing discussed at IReC

Many pertinent topics were discussed during two-day conference which saw participation of   25 funds and investors, 70 exhibitors, and over 700 delegates from India and international arena.

"Five years down the line, it will be hard to tell who started online first and went offline and who went from offline to online. This is what disruption in technology has brought to the retail and e-commerce sector. Disruption will bring them on the same platform henceforth! At IReC 2019, retailers and e-retailers looked beyond from what is, to what could be. IReC set a platform for the visionary talent to meet future tech to build a vision for the upcoming days," said, Ritu Marya, editor-in-chief, Retailer Media, one of the speakers, in the welcome note.

“Retail is moving towards creating seamless shopping experience. Hence, retailers should weave strategies to remove all friction from the shopping journey of customers to redefine the experience,” in the inaugural speech, Vasanth Kumar, managing director – Lifestyle International Pvt. Ltd, said.

During the conference, Amit Sharma, founder, ShopX, stressed on the key technologies and more importantly the need for India to build small format modern stores given the large kirana country we are, the new emergent business models can transform more than $500 billion of value across all retail categories.

Moreover, shoppers’ current expectations was also a topic for discussion, and how new age technologies such as AI and data intelligence are changing Indian retail forever. New trends in digital payments were widely covered in the panel.

“Higher domestic consumption is the key driver of expansion of physical stores and online retail,” Vikram Idnani, sr. vice president and head IT, Reliance Retail, said.

IReC also hosted four round table sessions on merchandise intelligence, Data Science, Customer experience and Human Resource. (RR)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India