Last updated on July 25th, 2024 at 04:35 pm

Throughout my decades-long career in e-commerce, I’ve watched the industry transform from a fringe business model into a multi-trillion-dollar global machine. Although the steady rise of e-commerce led many to predict the pandemic would spell the end of physical stores once and for all, demand for in-person retail is higher now than it was in 2020.

Believe it or not, three-quarters of all U.S. retail sales are forecasted to occur offline this year. And paradoxically, the next evolution of e-commerce may make physical storefronts more durable. In fact, I founded my most recent business on the premise that the era of isolated online and brick-and-mortar retail strategies is over.

I believe that going forward, innovative brands will apply a digital perspective to in-person retail—and unify offerings to deliver an improved customer experience across all channels. Here are four predictions on how that is likely to look.

1. Physical stores will no longer be “stores.”

The original purpose for physical storefronts was, quite literally, storage. Retailers needed a way to “store” inventory in locations that were accessible to shoppers. Now, rising property leases have prompted some retailers to relocate to smaller footprints—and many are finding that having less inventory on hand isn’t a disadvantage.

Modern retail and inventory technologies enable retailers to stock the bulk of their inventory in cost-effective warehouses and ship it directly to customers—even customers who place “orders” in-store. What’s the point of having a physical footprint when most purchases will arrive by mail? Why will shoppers even go to stores? The answer is simple: branding.

Stores are increasingly becoming a marketing and customer service investment—a physical extension of the brand. You can see this in luxury fashion hubs like Paris or Milan. Customers can only glean so much information from a Gucci or Prada website. For the full experience, they have to see the architecture, touch the products and feel the scarcity factor. Expect mainstream retailers to find similar ways to set their stores apart in the next five years.

2. Hardware will disappear.

Beginning in the 2000s, the retail industry replaced much of its antiquated hardware with modern payment terminals, credit card readers, receipt printers and inventory-monitoring RFID antennas. Now, many retailers may leave these tools behind, as well.

This transformation is already beginning. Tap-to-pay technology enables businesses to offload their payment terminals. The proliferation of NFC and Bluetooth-powered payment options will also reduce the necessity of cash and plastic credit cards, as will capabilities like “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) financing, which began as an online-only payment option but is now common at physical retailers.

As e-commerce capabilities become feasible for stores, retailers can add through subtraction. By ridding themselves of excess hardware, they can free up valuable real estate to create unique, immersive shopping experiences.

3. Stores will operate through a single device.

The end result of retailers discarding outdated hardware is that stores will primarily operate through software. Eventually, this software might even run on augmented reality glasses, allowing store associates to assist customers hands-free without having to look down at a screen.

For now, retailers can use mobile devices as their primary control center. It’s already possible for store associates to service customers entirely from their phones. They can place orders for items not available in-store, check product inventory across locations, process returns, check customers out from anywhere in the store and remain available for assistance after customers leave the premises.

In addition to these customer-facing tasks, modern retail software digitizes and simplifies backroom tasks like inventory management and cycle counts, enabling store associates to more efficiently track stock accuracy and keep customers satisfied.

4. Mobile apps are the new loyalty card.

Mobile apps are already emerging as the most powerful tool brands have to cultivate loyalty. Established retailers have undervalued mobile apps for years—in 2021, only 33% of retail brands had apps in place. But many fail to offer benefits that shoppers want, such as real-time inventory, exclusive promotions and chat capabilities. By incorporating these features, apps can better serve as a bridge between in-person and digital shopping experiences—while rewarding loyal customers with the most personalized experiences.

For example, customers can scan QR codes in-store to gain access to more comprehensive product info and branded content online. And after they’ve made their selection, they can use an app to complete their purchase—in some cases, without the help of a store associate. This seamless back-and-forth between channels helps retailers unify their in-person and e-commerce experiences under the same umbrella.

Apps can also benefit customers in ways they don’t see on their phone screens. Retailers can use the data that apps gather to deliver better service. For example, if a customer places a BOPIS order through a mobile app, store associates can receive the fulfillment request in real time and prepare it for the shopper’s arrival. Once there, the associates can be ready with the order when the customer steps in the door and suggest related products they might enjoy.

The channel conflict is over.

Look back years—decades, even—and you’ll find headlines heralding the rise of e-commerce and the decline of physical retail. But I believe it’s now clear that one is not destined to overthrow the other. Innovative retailers can lead the way by connecting traditional retail and e-commerce capabilities to offer customers greater control and flexibility over how they shop. In the future, the store’s potential as a marketing asset and value driver can finally come to fruition.

Stephan Schambach is the Founder and CEO of NewStore. This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Last updated on March 23rd, 2026 at 10:54 am

Consumers are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with retail brands’ outdated and unrewarding loyalty programs. As more consumers embrace mobile and prefer shopping in-app, it’s important to develop a mobile loyalty program that meets their expectations.

And many brands are doing just that. Mobile capabilities are now the most invested in technology for improving customer loyalty.

In this post, we discuss how mobile can help your brand reboot its loyalty program and win back customers.

How Current Loyalty Programs Fall Short

Retail brands not only want to acquire customers, but they also want to keep them. This is why there is a great emphasis on loyalty initiatives. The average consumer belongs to 16.7 loyalty programs, and in 2021, the global loyalty management market was worth $4.43 billion (predicted to surpass $18 billion by 2028). 

But the nature of loyalty has changed––traditional transactional programs are no longer the best option for brands. Research suggests that around two-thirds of established loyalty programs fail to deliver value (and many actually erode it). This is because brands are not living up to their customers’ expectations. One-third of consumers today dislike how difficult it is to earn rewards, and 27% say the rewards they do earn aren’t valuable enough. 

Customers don’t want loyalty schemes to be purely transactional. They want to feel like a valuable part of the brand and its community, and they’re willing to invest time and money with brands that recognize this. 

Brands that listen to and act on their customers’ desires to have more personalized loyalty experiences retain more customers. And a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%.

How Mobile Loyalty Programs Hit The Mark

First of all, physical loyalty cards are out and mobile loyalty is in––and it’s about time. The shopping process has evolved far beyond paper receipts, and in 2022, there is no reason to make customers keep track of a plastic card. An in-app member card can be swiped, opened, and scanned in stores. Plus, by enabling QR codes to launch a loyalty App Clip, you can make membership sign-up effortless.

With a mobile loyalty program, the process of building deep and long-lasting relationships with your customer is simplified. Loyalty features from in-app messaging to vouchers that are automatically added to customers’ carts help to both reduce friction and personalize the shopping experience.

Mobile loyalty helps you acquire and engage customers where they prefer to be, positively impacting customer retention and loyalty. 

Mobile Loyalty Paired With Mobile Customer Service: A Winning Formula

Hard benefits (discounts, rewards, prizes) get customers through the door. But delivering a great experience through exceptional customer service keeps them coming back. With a mobile app, brands can radically enrich the store experience. 

Already, 70% of loyalty program members access their rewards using an app––but true mobile loyalty doesn’t just mean an end to plastic loyalty cards. Store associates can use the app to take clienteling and loyalty to a new level. With mobile loyalty you can send customers push notifications or highly personalized messages about new products, their orders, and rewards.

Brands can easily offer white-glove service in every store. And phenomenal customer service is critical to a brand’s success. Customers who have a strong emotional connection to a brand frequent its stores more often and spend more money. In fact, fully engaged customers represent a ​​23% premium in profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer. 

Create Omnichannel Loyalty 

Mobile loyalty makes extending your loyalty program across channels effortless. Brands that embrace mobile loyalty will not only delight their customers but drive brand growth. On average, loyalty leaders grow their revenue approximately 2.5 times faster than their peers.

Mobile loyalty is helping brands unify digital and physical retail. And by meeting customers where they want to be—in-store and in-app—you can further cultivate long-lasting relationships and increase engagement across channels.

See how a NewStore Shopping App can help you create higher lifetime value customers with mobile loyalty. Get a demo today.

Last updated on March 23rd, 2026 at 10:54 am

The pandemic fundamentally changed the way we interact with businesses. Big meetings don’t have to be done in person. “Going to the movies” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going into a theater. And patronizing your favorite restaurant could mean DoorDash delivery to your kitchen.

It also affected loyalty. As supply chains stretched, some favorite brands became hard to find. More than 60% of U.S. consumers experienced out-of-stock items in 2021. Consequently, just 13% waited for the item to be back in stock before buying, and 39% bought a different product or the same item from a competing brand instead. Disconcertingly, 32% switched retailers. 

Getting those frequent customers back into the fold means taking a hard look at the inner workings of your loyalty program and reclaiming those buyers who loved you in “the before times.” 

Below are six tips for how to enhance customer loyalty and get your program in sync with the post-pandemic consumer mindset.

6 Ways to Improve Customer Loyalty

1. Survey Says

Asking loyal customers to rate their shopping experience through email or text can give your brand a boost–as long as it’s done right. Surveying your brand ambassadors shows you’re interested in what they think and is an opportunity to showcase new products and services. 

Keep your surveys short. Don’t ask more than three to four yes/no questions, and avoid leading questions that allude to the answer you’d prefer to receive. Also, don’t be afraid to share your findings with customers. Someone who is interested enough in your brand to complete a survey is likely interested in the results. Share information, such as “16% of your fellow customers also bought Product A last month, and 6% included Product B with their purchase.”

2. Embrace Mobile

Digital wallet users are expected to increase by 70% from 2020 to 2025. This greatly affects the old ways of handling loyalty. Everyone remembers the painstakingly designed loyalty cards we kept in physical wallets. These have been increasingly replaced by an associate asking the customer for their phone number so they can look up their account at the POS. However, this practice is quickly becoming outdated.

Consumers are getting more comfortable using their devices to interact with associates in the store. The next step in this evolution is loyalty through an app that the customer shows at checkout. Mobile loyalty solutions allow the retailer to easily communicate personalized messaging and provide customers with promotional vouchers and coupons. 

3. Personalize the Experience

Consumers want something in exchange for their loyalty, and the best gift brands can offer is a personalized experience. Jeff Bezos, in a prescient quote from 2000 said it best: “If we want to have 20 million customers, then we want to have 20 million ‘stores.’” In other words, creating a tailored experience is key.

With the data collected from loyalty programs on customer profiles and tendencies, rewards can be customized. A recent Mastercard study showed that customers who receive personalized offers from a retailer increase their spending by 18%. This can be done with simple gifts, such as surprising a customer with 10% off at checkout on their birthday or on the anniversary of when they signed up for the loyalty program. 

For instance, the Nike fitness app, NikeFuel, encourages users to share fitness goals and results, allowing them to compete with each other or others in the brand community. Target had success several years ago with its “Kid’s Wish List” app that allowed children to select toys they wanted for the holidays and included an opportunity to write to Santa. Meanwhile, parents received the wish list as well as discount coupons on merchandise.

4. Add a Creative Touch to Experiential Rewards

Experiential rewards have been a part of loyalty programs for years, but it may be time to evaluate those that really intrigue your best customers. The best experiential rewards highlight the brand and promote interaction, as well as create a “fear of missing out” sense that encourages the customer to jump in.

Popular beauty retailer Sephora offers free custom makeovers and invitations to exclusive events to its best loyalty shoppers. Neiman Marcus’ Chairman’s Circle members get salon services, in-store dining invitations, and free valet parking. The point is to make the experience resonate with those repeat customers.

5. Engage on Social

Using techniques such as social listening, you can get a good sense of what people are saying about your brand and where, and use that to give you an idea of what social media is most popular among these best customers. If a big segment is on TikTok, that gives you a channel to reach them. A surprising 74% of consumers rely on their social media to make purchasing decisions, which means if you’re not engaging with loyalty members where they are, you’re losing sales. 

With so much creativity shown on social media, brands need to think just as creatively to use it for their loyalty programs. When Foot Locker rolled out a new digital loyalty program in 2014, it included a promotion that tied into its customer’s social media. “HORSE with Harden” invited loyalty members to post videos of themselves making difficult shots on a basketball court. They were instructed to post the videos on their favorite social media with the campaign’s hashtags. Foot Locker would then select the best videos and a live streaming event for members was scheduled where they could watch NBA star James Harden attempt the same shots.

Contracting with influencers to spread the news about particular items can also drive sales. Perhaps an even better idea is to create your own influencer. Use incentives to encourage loyalty members to share their brand experiences on social media. With 92% of consumers trusting what family and friends have to say about a product or service, word-of-mouth marketing is amplified through social media.

6. Add Depth to Loyalty

In the past few years, brands have had success with offering loyalty rewards that correspond to various levels of engagement. The more you shop at the retailer, the more rewards you receive by being elevated in loyalty club “status.” A classic example is Nordstrom’s “Nordy Club.” Those with top tier “Icon Status” receive a plethora of benefits, including early access to sales, unlimited free alterations, and a special 24/7 customer service number.

Engagement levels work because they not only offer a transactional gift, such as a discount, but they also create an emotional attachment. They’re saying, “You’re so special to us, we’re going to give you even more than what we give a regular customer.” It’s hard to turn down an offer like that, especially if it’s with a brand you like.

Make the steps of engagement gradually harder to reach, but not painstakingly difficult or so easy they are no longer exclusive. The customer should feel they’re making progress with their purchasing habits.

Ultimately, figuring out how to enhance customer loyalty is critical in today’s retail environment. A healthy, productive loyalty program keeps your best customers under your wing while reducing customer acquisition costs through other marketing methods. Plus, your loyalty program gives you exclusive data about those regular customers that help with future merchandising, marketing, and operations.

Create more loyal customers with a NewStore Shopping App, which can connect to your existing loyalty or membership program.

Last updated on February 12th, 2020 at 10:09 am

At the root of its definition, omnichannel means always connected. Retailers that deliver a true omni experience have access to data and insights about customers, inventory and orders in real-time. It’s this ability to maintain an accurate 360-degree view of data then act on it that allows retailers to drive the seamless shopping experiences consumers expect.

Let’s dig into the expectations for a connected shopping experience, the benefits of being connected, and what you need to do to realize your vision for the store of the future.

Customers Expect In-store Mobility

The ubiquity of smartphones has opened up access to information unlike ever before. A report from BRP found 63% of consumers rely on mobile phones while shopping in-store. They use their devices to compare online and in-store prices, search for coupons and offers to get the best deals and check product availability, among other things.

This has changed retail as we know it. Consumers who are more connected and more informed are also more demanding. For example, if shoppers can order online with one tap, or get a product delivered in a day, why would they come in your store? They already have all this data at their fingertips, so what value does a store associate bring?

With a mobile point of sale (POS) system, a whole lot. From product discovery to order to receipt, customers can experience the same level of customer service in-store as they receive around-the-clock online.

The Benefits of A Connected Associate

The case for the connected store has never been stronger for customers and associates. Customers carry their devices everywhere and they expect sales associates to do the same. According to BRP’s report, 83% of shoppers said they expect retailers to provide stores associates with devices to do things like look up inventory.

Being connected is no longer a nicety. It’s a requirement of modern customer service and is core to associate productivity and brand profitability. Think of all the things a mobile-powered associate is:

• A POS for checkout and returns anywhere in-store.
• The ultimate personal shopping assistant with a 360-degree view of customers.
• A living website with a total view of inventory and the ability to digitize every touchpoint.
• Instant onsite customer support who can help in every retail scenario.

When store associates become mobilized, they can freely move about the entire store’s square footage. With access to accurate, consistent and timely data, associates can clientele from every corner, creating personal relationships that often result in greater lifetime customer value. They can also sell more product at full price and ensure fewer markdowns – this endless aisle capability can raise some same-store sales by 15 to 30%.

Connected mobile apps also increase associate productivity during those moments they’re not interacting with customers. This increased productivity is especially realized with tasks like inventory receiving and cycle counting – two traditionally labor-intensive duties that are made more accurate and efficient with mobile.

Architecting In-store Connectivity

We’ve talked about connectivity in the sense of connecting consumers, store associates, inventory information and stores to each other. However, network connectivity is also an essential lifeline for brands building stores of the future. With such high expectations for mobility, it’s critical that connectivity in-store is not only stable but on 100% of the time. Why? Because it can be costly for a retailer to be offline even if just for a minute. Industry analysts calculate that for each minute a POS system is down, it costs the retailer $4,700.00.

If you want to deliver a superior customer experience that’s always-on, you can’t rely on a landline-based network. You need a failover solution that kicks in immediately when problems arise – LTE is an answer when Wi-Fi is down.

Even more, you need to separate the networks used by associates for retail operations and by customers for browsing. Think about the number of people downloading videos in-store and using Wi-Fi for personal tasks. The end result is latency and drag, which can get in the way of associates accessing the information they need to do their job and do it well. 

A solution that might work for your brand is a Network-as-a-Service. Like having all of your data connected and visible, you can have a single source of truth for all your network services – from POS to digital signage to Wi-Fi. If your IT team runs lean or is looking for efficiencies, this may be an option to consider. 

Always Connected, Always Omnichannel

Every use case for true omnichannel depends on mobile connectivity. Reach out to our team to learn how to build a connected store.