Reporter’s notebook: The National Retail Federation’s Big Show

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Come to the National Retail Federation’s Big Show and you’ll know you’ve been lied to: Retail is not dead. If retail were dead, 38,000 attendees, 16,000 retailers, and 800 exhibitors wouldn’t have come together to explore its future.

The expo floor and sessions at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Center were heavy on both technological advancements and integration.

Alexa say what?

In a featured session, Atom Tickets co-founder and Chairman Matthew Bakal and Amazon Pay Vice President Patrick Gauthier talked about how voice and other AI-powered experiences are reshaping retail. Bakal noted a growing number of people who use their voice assistants in buying tickets.

“On Alexa, you can use your synched Amazon Pay account, you can select your seat. We have a reserved seating algorithm that picks the best seat for you. It makes it really seamless for you to buy your ticket and go to the movies,” Bakal said.

Voice assistance is significant, Bakal explained. People talk to it on their phone, in their home, in their car. According to Joe Halkias, brand analyst for New York-based intent marketing cloud Synup, optimizing a business for searching via voice assistant now is an important factor in keeping the business relevant.

When you make a search on your computer, it gives you endless options. That’s not the case for voice assistants, though.

“If I ask Amazon Alexa for a pizza place near me, it’s giving just one option, and it’s using all the business info available to rank that. If there are two pizza places and one is on top of managing their Google, they have really great photos and tons of reviews, Google is clearly going to rank that above the rest,” Halkias said. “It’s about how you optimize for position zero,” he added, referring to the topmost result from a Google search.

Since position zero is all a voice assistant will share with a user, it’s the only spot businesses should aim for, he explained. To get there, it’s all about enriched content: plenty of photos, 4 and 5 star reviews, and high levels of engagement with customers. That is: respond to reviews.

Having a business profile is more important than having a website because “it’s proven that 90 percent of consumers don’t actually interact with websites anymore,” he said. “If you want to make a buying decision, you’re not going to go to Kohls.com. You’ll go to Google and say ‘stores near me.’”

Real world gaming

Gamification, the application of typical elements of game playing like point scoring and competition to other areas to encourage engagement with a product or service, came up multiple times at the Big Show.

Carla Li, the global head of product for sponsorship and business processes at Pokemon Go creator Niantic Labs, explained how mobile games – like her company’s signature augmented reality game – can be used to increase attendance and sales at commercial locations. Contrary to popular belief that it appeals only to children, the median age of Pokemon Go users is 33 years old, and 58 percent of players say that when the game has taken them into malls, stores, or other commercial locations, they’ve spent money there. A 7-Eleven in Taiwan increased purchases by 10.5 percent by driving people into the store through the game, Li recounted.

Because it’s a location-based game, Pokemon Go is able to offer site-specific deals to customers while they’re in the store or when they enter the parking lot, driving consumers’ engagement with retailers.

Contrary to popular belief that it appeals only to children, the median age of Pokemon Go users is 33 years old, and 58 percent of players say that when the game has taken them into malls, stores, or other commercial locations, they’ve spent money there.

“When people are going out and about in the real world playing our games, [two-thirds of them] are running errands or playing with their friends,” Li said. “This provides a unique opportunity for brands and retailers to become part of this experience, to become natively integrated such that players have a fun reason to visit their location and not just do their shopping chore and drag their children along with them unwillingly, but actually something that makes it fun for the whole family to do.”

Exhibitor Om Kundu used this concept with his website Inspirave, a mobile wish list and “social savings network” where friends and family and up vote or down vote items on your wish list and help fund your chance to own them.

“That then gives you a reference to make a decision. Should I or shouldn’t I? The merchant will always say buy it, but the people around you, like your mother, they know you better than anyone.” Kundu said. “The process is totally gamified.”

Just bring your face

In the next year, quick-service restaurants in New Jersey will begin offering “face pay,” which is exactly what it sounds like. The technology to pay with your face already exists at order kiosks at Chicago chain Deli Fresh and North Carolina chain Dairi-O and is being integrated into popular southern fast-food chain Bojangles. Face-based payment is more convenient, explained Cali Group Chief Executive Officer John Miller, who demonstrated the technology by standing in front of a kiosk that promptly asked “Are you John Miller?” before populating his most recent (and most likely) orders and allowing him to pay without ever swiping his card.

Faces are stored and recognized in the system and attached to an encrypted token that payment information is attached to. About 100 kiosks are deployed in the U.S.

“About half of the people that interact with a kiosk choose to use the face service to interact with it, and a large percentage of people who log in with face also use it to pay. These places that adopt it, the staff and the restaurant want people to use it because it goes faster. If you have a big line, people go somewhere else when they walk in the door, so people are encouraged to sign up,” Miller said.

It’s “super secure,” he said. Payment information is protected by the encrypted token, and the part that’s not protected—your face—is available for free anyway on the internet.

“In the long run, we don’t think people will worry too much. There are cameras everywhere taking your picture already. It is a concern, but more people than not are happy to do it,” Miller said.

It’s coming to the New York metro area, including New Jersey, in 2020 “for sure,” he said.

Home base

Two New Jersey-based companies explained why the Big Show was an important place for them to be.

Brother International Corp., based in Bridgewater, has been attending for 10 years. “Retail has been one of the brand’s strongest markets. Our products fit perfectly in retail, whether it’s a cash wrap, a back office, we have mobile products. Basically, all of our customers are here, and all of our potential customers are, too. This is where you go to have these conversations,” said Director of Sales Michael Zolot.

Retailers use Brother’s technology for services like ship-from-store, and for buy-online-return-to-store for shipments back to the warehouse. They also have mobile printers for non-stationary point-of-sales systems that enable “line busting,” the process of shortening or eliminating checkout lines by removing customers from the main line and allowing them to pay at another area.

Koamtac Inc., a Princeton-based barcode scanner showcased technology like its finger trigger glove, which reminiscent of Spiderman points a laser out of the user’s index finger to scan and log a number of barcodes in a short amount of time for inventory purposes.