Introduction

If you follow the Zappts blog, you saw that in the last few weeks we published about the main technology trends for your company in 2023, where we addressed the topic from a broader and “cross-market” perspective, that is, presenting what, from a technological point of view, will impact markets in Brazil and the world in 2023. In this publication we will go into more detail about trends from the perspective of the retail market, which is responsible for a significant portion of the country’s GDP. We already knew that technology investment in this market is only going up, but what will be the challenges for technology managers in the Brazilian retail sector? What are the attention points that technology professionals in this segment need to be aware of in 2023?

General Overview

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a trend is: “Something that leads someone to follow a certain path or act in a certain way”. Everything designed as a trend has as its main objectives to bring innovation, optimize something specific that already exists, generate scalability and pioneering. For years Brazilian markets copied strategies from countries in the northern hemisphere, but in recent years, and increasingly, Brazil has been becoming a great protagonist when it comes to technology, setting the pace of markets and generating innovation wherever it goes.

With that in mind, we start this chapter recalling the top 10 tech trends for 2023, according to the Gartner report:

1. Digital immune system (focus on Quality Assurance)

2. Applied observability (focus on data and AI)

3. AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM)

4. Industry cloud platforms (focus on infrastructure)

ÔÇì5. Platform engineering (focus on developer experience)

6. Wireless value realization (focus on APIs, integration and connectivity)

7. Superapps (focus on composability and UX Design)

8. Adaptive AI (focus on data and automation)

9. Metaverse (focus on Web3 solutions)

10. Sustainable Technology (focus on continuity)

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More details about these trends can be found by clicking here. According to Gartner, there are 3 main technology challenges for generating business results in 2023, regardless of the market your company operates in:

1) Optimize IT systems for greater reliability, improving technology leaders’ decision-making, guided by secure data and maintaining the integrity of production systems value.

2) Accelerate offerings in served verticals, increasing the pace of digital product delivery with quality and enabling connectivity everywhere, even those with low internet coverage.

3) Enable business model evolution and change, reinventing roles and engagement with collaborators, prospects and customers, accelerating experimentation with innovative strategies to explore new virtual markets.

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Now that we’ve seen the 3 main challenges that technology managers need to face in 2023, as well as the top 10 technology trends for the year, let’s analyze the trends for the retail segment.

Tech trends in the Brazilian retail sector

The retail sector was one of the segments that needed to innovate the most during the pandemic. With part of the population at home, digital platforms had a boom of users eager for online shopping, but not all portals were prepared for this flood of access. Retailers and brands from different sectors bet on online to engage and reach their customers.

Technology professionals in the sector need to understand the changes driven by this historical moment as an opportunity to better serve the growing group of digital consumers.

Euromonitor International mapped the five digital trends that are redefining the retail sector worldwide, and we present each of them below.

Metaverse Stores: the new immersion experience

Differentiating yourself in an increasingly competitive digital market means transforming the traditional and static online experience into something dynamic and personalized. The promise of a more inclusive and better connected virtual world, known as the metaverse, can further transform the way people buy on the internet, creating immersive brand interactions and boosting engagement with their audiences. In a way, the metaverse is an extension of virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies in use today, with the addition of new technologies such as blockchain.

Innovative retail companies continue to integrate AR/VR technologies into their shopping experiences. Industry business professionals indicate that 2023 investments in this area will first focus on brand engagement with consumers, and only then will explore more complex use cases, such as replicating a physical experience online or creating an immersive virtual store.

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Delivery in minutes: predictive logistics

The evolution of delivery in terms of timing and personalization only grows. Reducing delivery times is fundamental to sustain e-commerce growth. Retail companies and delivery apps already guarantee in some cases that the purchased product is delivered in less than 10 minutes, depending on the region, time and product. To achieve this, they focus on locating operations and positioning products closer to the end consumer, even before an order is placed.

This new business model facilitates and speeds up the receipt of categories of products previously isolated from the growing wave of electronic commerce, such as food and beverages. The results of this change can already be perceived by the sector’s technology leaders. The percentage of digital consumers who bought groceries online increased from 48% in 2020 to 54% in 2021, according to Euromonitor. Food and beverages had one of the biggest jumps in online shopping compared to other products.

Emerging from the pandemic, ultra-fast delivery is shaping the next evolution of e-commerce, making impulse purchases more accessible.

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Green E-commerce: cost reduction and long-term vision

The e-commerce boom positioned convenience and sustainability on opposite paths. Online orders sent carbon emissions through the roof, with same-day deliveries further increasing air transport and energy costs.

In addition, online deliveries from retailers and food service and fashion operators usually come in disposable plastics, cardboard boxes, among other solid waste, many of which are non-recyclable. Also, e-commerce suffers from high product return rates, causing additional emissions and packaging waste.

In this scenario, e-commerce operators are under pressure to make products, packaging and deliveries more sustainable. In 2021, 46% of digital consumers said climate change will have more impact on their lives in the next five years than now, a four percentage point increase from 2019, according to Euromonitor research.

This movement is expected to accelerate in the coming years, as e-commerce sales tend to increase more and more, as does concern about climate issues. With elevated expectations from consumers and other stakeholders, and the imminent increasingly strict regulation, a transition to sustainable e-commerce seems inevitable.

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Click and collect: the benefits of consumer pickup

Supply chains in Brazil and around the world are reaching their limits and labor shortages are intensifying each year. These factors have a cascading effect on delivery times, which are becoming less reliable, generating negative reviews on portals like Reclame Aqui.

As a result, more consumers are expected to prefer click and collect services, forcing retailers and food service and fashion operators to rethink their omnichannel strategies to keep up with this growing demand, in addition to making adaptations to their marketplaces.

Along with this constantly evolving consumer mindset toward digital, retailers realize that click and collect services meet their interests more than home delivery. Lower costs are incurred in comparison, in addition to the time spent during the purchase process.

Strategically promoting these services, and even encouraging this behavior with discounts or loyalty points, will be of interest to retailers in different markets.

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Predictive personalization: the importance of data

The concept of loyalty is in constant movement ÔÇô as much as what it means, as what the reward for such loyalty will be. Consumers are more digitally experienced, raising expectations due to growing competition. Fortunately, there is a greater volume and variety of data that companies can use not only to make their offerings more personalized, but also more predictive.

Creating an ecosystem that offers more than a single product or service can help boost loyalty and encourage consumers to share even more of their personal data. Amazon and Alibaba are two of the most well-known examples of companies that diversified beyond their core offerings to create platforms that keep consumers active, regardless of customer needs.

Ultimately, digital consumers respond to brands that can promote an intimate conversation, cultivating a store or website that seems specially designed just for them. Companies must also shift from reactive customer strategies to real-time and even predictive strategies.

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Social Commerce: click by click

In Brazilian retail in 2023, we should see a lot of Social Commerce being boosted. Projections indicate a growth of about 30% in global sales through these channels in the next five years, according to Gartner. This trend proves concrete since consumers trust other consumers much more than brand advertising and commercials on their traditional channels.

Social commerce is a subset of e-commerce that involves the use of social networks, allowing social interaction where users help other users buy and sell products and services online. It’s the era of influencers!

This strategy in the Brazilian retail sector opens up many possibilities for business development, such as integration with major retail networks, apps that analyze consumer behavior in real time and help social media users discover new brand products and services.

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All Delivery and Retail Tech: omni products in omni channels

All Delivery and Retail Techs are also on a market rise, where studies indicate that major Brazilian retailers are eyeing platforms and services offered by New Retail Techs, startups that offer technological solutions aimed at the retail and consumer market. These businesses are born with the goal of bringing more efficiency and productivity to retailers, and the entire chain related to this market.

A trend among Retail Techs is precisely All Delivery, that is, the possibility of delivering anything the customer wants to buy and delivering it in record time. This concept was cited in a Sebrae report that highlights as insight the need for retailers to invest in good delivery experiences, including factors such as agility, transparency and personalization in delivery services.

Omnichannel, a content strategy between channels that organizations use to improve user experience and drive better relationships with their audience at touchpoints, remains a strong concept as an investment projection for 2023. Phygital, the union of physical and digital, is definitely here to stay and according to a Sebrae report, 84% of consumers say the ideal experience is in integrated physical and virtual environments.

The report also shows that in-store purchases are no longer consumers’ preferred format, but they are not willing to give up one format in favor of another. For 39% of the audience, physical and online channels are complementary, not competing.

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Superapps: microservices and data intelligence

Superapps, the front-end of a platform where mini-applications (or mini-programs) can be published for users to activate as needed, continue strong in 2023. According to Gartner, by 2027, more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple superapps.

This technology provides end users (customers, partners or employees, for example) with a set of resources, in addition to access to independently created mini-applications. A superapp is a platform that offers consistent and personalized experiences to users. That is, users can discover and activate their own set of applications, providing a highly personalized and contextualized digital experience within a single app.

A challenge for retailers is to become even more present in their customers’ lives, as more and more apps compete for space in people’s daily lives. Therefore, we see the importance of talking about customer centricity.

Customer Centric aligns with all the trends presented in this article, showing that companies that put their customers and their journeys at the center have much higher profitability compared to other companies.

Primordial to this concept is knowing in depth consumers’ habits and behavior, requiring cross-referencing data from different bases for rapid decision-making. It is worth noting that for this process to succeed, these databases need to be very well structured.

A crucial point is that Customer Centric strategies must be very well planned, without forgetting that the customer needs to identify with the brand, feel represented, recognized, valued and unique. One way to achieve this point is to make them impacted in a unique way, that is, through differentiated campaigns, whether by colors they interact with more, by font types that please them, and obviously by offers that bring relevance.

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The biggest challenges for Brazilian retailers in 2023

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A big challenge in the Brazilian retail sector is finding a technology partner with know-how and proven market experience to support the sector’s digital evolution, digital transformation, among other challenges of the decade. Regardless of use case, industries need to ensure the best digital experience for their stakeholders, with assured quality and trust. Learn below how Zappts can support your industry in 2023:

Marketplace and e-commerce Development

ÔÇìWe are specialists in integrating the best solutions to maximize results including the use of market CRM platforms (such as Salesforce and VTEX), off-the-shelf front-end solutions and pure development.

Digital Channels Development

ÔÇìWe help retail sector institutions develop, optimize and integrate their digital channels, boosting their relationship with customers through memorable digital experiences powered by omnichannel applications.ÔÇì

Retail Experience Design

ÔÇìThrough our structured processes, we help companies in the design, creation, prototype development and testing process to accelerate the development of new digital solutions.

Loyalty for Retail

ÔÇìWe perform complete diagnosis and implementation of loyalty programs using iClubs technology, a solution developed within Zappts.

Integration Tools

ÔÇìWe help retail companies design and apply API & Middleware strategies with security and optimized governance, ensuring integration with suppliers, partner ecosystems, B2B customers and communities.

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To learn more about these solutions and schedule a free 1-hour assessment with our consultants, get in touch by clicking here.

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About Zappts

Since 2014 in the market, Zappts has been accelerating the digital transformation of major brands such as Porto, Getnet, BTG Pactual, Cateno, Ambev, Multilaser, Ultragaz, C&A and Burger King, among others. Focused on software development, especially in Front-end, UX Design, Quality Assurance and Cloud Environment Management, it operates in the planning, management and operation of corporate digital solution development services, environment management and knowledge transfer through information technology. A reference in creating digital experiences for users, in addition to developing innovative and fast solutions, the company operates in a 100% remote model, with teams distributed across more than 18 states in Brazil.