Retail Automation Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

Retail Automation Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The retail automation market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.41% over the forecast period (2021-2026). Recently, the retailers have been facing challenges, as the technological revolution has gained attention and adoption at a significant pace. Such technologies and innovations have been reshaping the behavior of consumers and their way of collaborating and communicating pre - and post-sales. Features, such as convenience and transparency, provided by automation, have been pushing the retailers to adapt and upgrade their PoS systems. Furthermore, the demand for PoS systems has been significantly rising among small retail stores, owing to its cost-effective nature.

Key Highlights

• Automation can be much more important to the retailers who cannot keep a full time IT staff for keeping their devices up and running. PoS failures are also an inevitable phenomena. For instance, Target experienced a POS failure during peak hours on Father’s Day, which led to delays, and eventually, the halt of its store operations. Macy’s, on the other hand, suffered from a credit card payment glitch on Black Friday. These issues have cost the retailers big time. On the other hand, as e-commerce has been experiencing steady growth while relocating customers away from retail stores, the physical retailers have resorted to new in-store experience by leveraging automation.
• In January 2020, Quantzig, global data analytics, and advisory firm delivered actionable analytics solutions to resolve complex business problems and launched advanced retail data analytics solutions for the retail industry. As Amazon and allied counterparts raised awareness about in-store shopping experience speeding up transactions, AI-based video detection and analytics have found a way to act as an addendum toward such a trend. Additionally, Deep North, an analytics platform for retailers, which bases its expertise on videos from the CCTV and other cameras to provide analytics and insights, raised USD 25.7 million in funding in March 2020. Such Series A round funding is planned to be utilized across the expansion of its platform.
• Salesforce, back in September 2019, announced Consumer Goods Cloud, a product that enables consumer goods companies to drive revenue growth and maximize ROI through improved retail execution capabilities. The company believes that nearly 95 % of consumer goods products are sold in physical stores. With consumer goods, cloud retailers may utilize AI to optimize critical tasks, drive higher revenues. At the same time, its Einstein Analytics for Consumer Goods would offer intelligence by giving KPIs, such as inventory stock-outs or percent orders increase per store visit, as well as AI-powered insights and recommendations, specifically tailored for their customers.
• The COVID-19 pandemic has led retail businesses to take precautionary measures, leading to the closures of several outlets. Owing to this, retailers and leading luxury brands have been facing short-term challenges across sustained revenues, health and safety, supply chain management, labor shortages, and pricing, to name a few. With governments worldwide enforcing quarantines to curb transmission of COVID-19, people staying back at home has led to increased online shopping and bulk-buying of goods. This has resulted in a massive supply chain stress. Thus, such supply chain players among retailers have been looking to deploy AI and smart analytics to ensure resilience.

Key Market TrendsGrocery is Expected Hold Significant Share

• Self-checkout kiosks are among some of the standard automation solutions deployed in supermarkets. Grocery chain Kroger uses sensors, and predictive analytics means to forecast when more cashiers will be needed. Then, the impact of COVID-19 on the United States retail led to Taco Bell, Target, Hy-Vee supermarkets in the Midwest, Speedway convenience stores, and Jack in the Box started to support Apple Pay, which is a contactless payment system that enables customers to quickly and securely pay in stores using their Apple Watch and iPhone.
• In 2019 Phononic’s “Store of the Future Report,” nearly nine out of ten Americans (86 %) said that mobile apps would allow people to scan groceries as they shop and then pay through an app in the next five years. Grabango is working closely with three of the top thirty grocers on Progressive Grocer’s Super 50 list and one of the top 10 convenience stores, assigns every shopper a “virtual basket” when they walk through the door. The technology company uses proprietary hardware, called “G rails,” which includes a high number of low-cost sensors lined up and down the aisles.
• When the first Amazon Go store opened to the public in January 2018, shoppers could walk into the store; grab whatever they’d like; put it in coat pockets, bags or elsewhere, and walk out. All the customers require is an app. Within less than two years, and Amazon plans to open 3,000 cashier-less stores, with a significant number of players entering the category in a big way. The tech companies have their sights not only on 2,000- or 3,000-square-foot convenience stores, but also on grocery stores ten times that size or larger. The grocery sector has long tried to solve the friction of the checkout experience. From opening more registers to implementing self-service kiosks, no solutions have yet to satisfy both the retailer and the customer entirely.
• Zippin, which operates an Amazon Go rival store in San Francisco to display its technology, has a cashier-less system that uses multiple sources of information, both cameras and shelf sensors, to triangulate and receive the correct information. There are several reasons retailers may find checkout-free systems to be the answer to increased profits, including, but not limited to, fewer employees behind the register, a reduction in theft by fraud, and new customer data like they’ve never had in the past.

North America is Expected to Hold Major Share

• The retail automation market in the United States is expected to be driven by the growing adoption of automation technologies by major players, such as Walmart and Amazon. Part of the adoption is also attributable to changing consumer preferences. A Digimarc study found that 88% of the American adults prioritize faster check out, over slow checkout speeds and long lines. Major retailers in the region have adhered to such complaints and adapted to the quick and secure checkout process.
• Digital payment is set to become the preferred mode of payment for citizens across the United States, considering the e-commerce trends. Moreover, digital payment is the preferred mode of payment among millennials. Enabling traditional POS and mPOS devices to accept, mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay have eased out by streamlining the transaction process.
• According to the latest US Census Bureau Annual Retail Trends report, retail sales have climbed 23% from 2010 until 2018, and the Y-o-Y growth since 2012 has averaged just under 4%. However, a significant portion of this growth has occurred in the e-commerce sector. Amazon's growth alone has quintupled from USD 16 to USD 80 billion over the past six years, ending 2017. The retailers in the region have recognized the need to incentivize digital payments, thus offering more tangible benefits in the mind of the consumer, such as loyalty benefits.

Competitive Landscape

The retail automation market is fragmented due to the presence of many retail automation solution providers across the globe. Since the technology of automation is still developing, the competition amongst the market players is very intense. Also, the existing market players are innovating consistently by spending on R&D substantially to prevent the new market entrants from entering the market and diluting the market shares of the current players. Also, they're considering expansion as a route to maximize the existing market share.

• May 2020 - Datalogic announced an investment in AWM Smart Shelf, a California-based computer vision and AI company. AWM offers a comprehensive set of solutions to the retail sector, both grocery and non-grocery, including autonomous checkout (AWM Frictionless), Automated Inventory Intelligence (Aii), consumer demographics and behavior tracking, as well as a complete software suite, Retail Analytics Engine (RAE), for in-store analytics and reporting.
• December 2019 - Emarsys announced that professional tool retailer Total Tools had chosen its retail marketing platform to deliver personalized, omnichannel customer experiences. Accordingly, Total Tools has deployed the Emarsys retail marketing platform, including its customer data platform and marketing automation tools, to collect and merge CRM data from its customers in one central location. With only one customer view, Total Tools will be able to personalize communications across multiple channels, including in-store, email, Facebook, Google, and its web platform.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support

Companies Mentioned

IBM Corporation
Oracle Corporation
Internap Corporation
Packet Inc. (An Equinix Inc. Company)
Scaleway Inc.
Amazon Web Services Inc
Rackspace Inc.
CenturyLink, Inc.
LightEdge Solutions, Inc

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