每日跟讀#515: A Glimpse of Our Shopping Future

What will the store of the future look like? Will we be served by fleets of gleaming robots, using built-in facial recognition technology to adjust each sales pitch to a person’s current mood or past spending preferences? Will there be voice-activated personal assistants, downloading the availability, color and fit of any and every garment to your smartphone? Three-D printing stations? No checkout counters when you leave? Could there even be floating, holographic product displays on the shop floor that change when a customer walks by?

Perhaps shoppers will make all their purchases from their own home, using virtual fitting rooms via virtual reality headsets. Drones will then drop deliveries in the backyard or on the front steps.

未來的商店看起來會像什麼樣子？我們會接受成排閃閃發光的機器人服務，讓這些機器人藉由內建的臉部辨識科技，把推銷商品的用語調整成適合客人當下的心情或過往的消費喜好嗎？會有聲控個人助理，把每件服裝的供貨情況、顏色和版型下載到你的智慧手機裡嗎？可會有3D列印站？離店時不會再有結帳櫃檯了嗎？當顧客走過店家地板時，半空中會展示產品全像投影嗎？

也許消費者會在自家戴上虛擬實境眼鏡，用虛擬試衣間完成所有的購物行為，接著無人機會把商品投送到後院或前門台階上。

As fanciful as these innovations may sound, none are hypothetical. All exist, are being tested and could be rolled out in as little as a decade. But is this the sort of shopping experience that customers really want?

Scores of leading retailers and fashion brands increasingly say no. And in an ever-more-volatile and unpredictable shopping environment, where long-term survival is dictated by anticipating and catering to consumers’ desires (often before they themselves even know what they want), the race to find out how and where people will do their spending has started to heat up.

這些新事物聽來不真實，卻都不是空想，全部都已存在，正在試驗階段，最快可能在10年內問世。不過，這種購物經驗真的是消費者要的嗎？

許多居領導地位的零售商和時尚品牌日益發現，不是的。在變動越來越快且無法預測的購物大環境中，能否預見並迎合顧客的欲望（通常甚至是在顧客自己知道想要什麼之前），決定了誰能長存，找出人們如何、在哪裡花錢的競賽開始變得激烈了。

Last month, for example, Farfetch — the global online marketplace for independent luxury boutiques — held a daylong event at the Design Museum in London. There, in front of 200 fashion industry insiders and partners, Jose Neves, the founder of Farfetch, unveiled “The Store of the Future,” a suite of new technologies developed by his company to help brands and boutiques bridge the worlds of online and offline.

Nevertheless, in a telephone call the week before the event, Neves said: “I am a huge believer in physical stores. They are not going to vanish and will stay at the center of the seismic retail revolution that is only just getting started.”

且舉一例，就在上個月，獨立奢華精品店的全球線上購物平台Farfetch在倫敦「設計博物館」辦了一整天的活動。在活動中，Farfetch創辦人內維斯在200位時尚產業圈內人和合作夥伴面前發表了「未來的商店」，這是Farfetch研發的一套新科技，協助品牌和精品店結合線上與線下世界。

不過，在活動舉辦之前那一周，內維斯在電話中說：「我是實體商店徹頭徹尾的信徒。實體商店不會消失，會在這場才剛開始的零售業劇烈變革中，保持在中心位置。」

A corresponding report newly released by Bain & Co. suggests that he might be right; although 70 percent of high-end purchases are influenced by online interactions, the consultancy maintains that stores will continue to play a critical role, with 75 percent of sales still occurring in a physical location by 2025.

What may change, however, is a store’s primary purpose. Forget e-commerce, or bricks and mortar, or even omnichannel sales; according to Neves, the new retail era is one anchored in “augmented retail,” a blend of the digital and physical allowing a shopper to shift seamlessly between the two realms.

貝恩諮詢公司最近發布一份與此呼應的報告，顯示內維斯可能是對的：雖然70%的高檔消費受網路互動影響，但貝恩斷言，實體商店仍將扮演重要角色，到2025年，75%的銷售額仍將發生在實體通路。

不過，可能改變的是實體商店的主要目的。忘掉電子商務、實體商店、甚至是全通路銷售吧，內維斯說，新的零售時代緊緊植根於「擴增零售」，這種零售融合數位與實體，讓消費者在兩種領域之間來去自如。

Source: https://paper.udn.com/udnpaper/POH0067/312703/web/

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