Choosing a Platform for In-Store Technology

As digital transformation drives fast-paced changes in how consumers engage with brands, enterprise retailers need unparalleled versatility from their in-store technology platform.

Traditional in-store technology has featured custom-built hardware that delivers a single point solution—your price scanner, point-of-sale terminal, custom ordering station, product locator, and so on. This has led to an increasingly complex array of disparate, disconnected solutions, which can be a real headache to synchronize, upgrade, or expand.

As a result, enterprise retail is moving toward systems that can replace existing point solutions while also delivering the flexibility to enable new solutions and workflows. When considering new deployments, evaluations should include five key criteria:

• Ease of use
• Price-performance ratio
• Product lifecycle support
• Scalability
• Developer ecosystem

Traditional retail technology consists of purpose-built hardware that was either designed for a single point solution—cost-effective, but low-performing from a versatility and customer experience standpoint—or multi-purpose—with impressive power and versatility that comes at a price point that can be prohibitive at scale.

Consumer devices as a retail technology platform

With the tremendous advancement of consumer-based technologies in recent years, modern enterprises now have an enticing new alternative to traditional retail technologies: tools that offer the versatility and rich feature set of expensive multi-purpose enterprise hardware, but at a price point that rivals the inexpensive, lower performing traditional point solutions.

Consumer devices are rapidly expanding their footprint in the enterprise as a cost-effective, powerful, versatile, expandable, innovative solution that offers unmatched price for performance.

Leading retailers are increasingly leveraging the best-in-market consumer technology platform in their enterprise, and that is iOS. Learn more about how iOS enables a range of enterprise solutions bt utilizing consumer devices: