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Highly regarded by many key players in the retail industry, EuroShop is a trade fair founded in 1966 at the initiative of the EHI Retail Institute and takes place every three years since the 1975 edition. The 2023 edition took place from February 26 to March 2, and the IADS attended the session to understand the remarkable trends emerging from this year’s EuroShop fair, as the first post-pandemic edition.

In the same manner that department stores are houses of everything customers need, EuroShop is truly the warehouse of everything retailers need. From hangers or cardboard boxes to advanced customer recognition systems and startup tech, the variety of topics is impressive. This year, 1,830 exhibitors from 55 nations gathered on more than 120,000 sqm, disseminated across 17 pavilions and covered 7 areas of interest: Retail Marketing, Retail Technology, Lighting, Shopfitting & Visual Merchandising, Store Design (including materials and surfaces), Food Service Equipment, and Refrigeration & Energy management.

81,000 trade visitors attended the session, of which 50% were retail professionals (from manager to C-level) and 68% came from abroad (especially from Southeast Asia, Africa and North America). In comparison to 2020, just before the global pandemic outburst at the end of February, 2,300 exhibitors welcomed 94,000 visitors, which suggests that, although the world has reopened, the fair industry has not yet fully recuperated to its pre-pandemic levels (this is probably due to the subsisting difficulties for Chinese nationals to travel in spite of being authorized to do so).

At first sight, the fair is overwhelming, and it is difficult to know what to explore. This is why we asked IADS partner Retail Hub’s CEO Massimo Volpe for his opinion and angle. Together, the key learnings that we took home were the following:

-    Autonomous (checkout-free) stores are developing fast. This raises an interesting point for department stores, as they may have to adapt to customers who are increasingly used to buying in checkout-free stores for a certain type of goods. Even though checkout-free systems might not be adapted to the nature of the business in department stores, customers may be expecting new and frictionless experiences while shopping and at checkout in department stores.

-    Computer vision is now used for any type of store analysis and most retailers are embracing (or claim to do so) this technology. Given the fact that AI is the next stop for retailers, and as such, it needs to be fed with data, equipping points of sales with tools, enabling computer vision is becoming absolutely critical.

-    AI makes the headlines in the newspapers and is poised to give birth to an increasing number of commercial applications, either through off-the-shelves products or via tailor-made solutions. We identified three interesting business cases as a very subjective selection.

-    Sustainability was a very important topic of discussion during the fair, with many different technological approaches provided to retailers.

The IADS wandered along all the aisles to identify the most interesting suppliers and exhibitors. The following list is, in essence, subjective and not exhaustive.

What are the potential consequences of the checkout-free frenzy for department stores?

Autonomous store initiatives are a topic that we closely follow, as the technological value proposition is great (improved customer experience, reduced costs), but can also come with downsides (mistakes inherent to the system or lack of interest from customers). The industry is reported to have grown by +11% in 2021 in terms of systems shipped globally.

All visitors paid a visit to the “Just Walk Out” stand from Amazon, a technology launched in 2018 that is now available in 40 Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores in the US (and other destinations too). The technology is also made available to other brands, such as Starbucks or WH Smith.

Amazon is reportedly the retailer that is operating the largest number of checkout-free stores globally but is not the only one in the game. Tesco opened its first checkout-free store in London end of 2021, through a partnership with computer vision start-up Trigo Retail which uses a combination of cameras and weight sensors to define what customers have picked up, and then charge them directly through the app when they leave the store (Trigo is also behind the scenes for grocers REWE and Aldi in Germany and the Netherlands respectively).

The interest of this technology is that nobody has to scan products (customers or sales assistants) and, in the most optimal use case in which customers have to “log in” via an app to enter a store, this equates for the retailer to have as many data collection points as on its online interfaces (and often leverage its online technical capabilities and apply them to the store). However, this raises questions when it comes to potential customers’ resistance to such data collection, not to mention customers who are actually coming for advice and interaction with salespersons (which would also explain why, for now, this technology has mainly spread among grocers). Analysts believe that this technology is mostly valid for products involving low engagement, which is often not the case in department stores.

As a consequence, department stores often focus on the cash-desk experience, as most of them have, so far, developed self-check-out capabilities, as a middle way to reduce waiting time at the cash desk and give customers options in terms of the interaction they want to have. It is therefore all about going frictionless, but with some limits.

Shopreme, for instance, offers a scan & go solution, for now mostly available at grocers and hypermarkets, but the solution is also available in white label and can be integrated into any retailer’s shopping app. The point of the solution is its real-time feature: customers can see in real-time the value of their basket, while retailers can see their selection, and nudge their purchases, or offer on-the-spot promotion (or cross-selling purchase selection), through live actions. As a consequence, it is interesting to note that Shopreme’s selling point is not to be ‘simply’ a purchasing app or a smart-cart solution such as Cust2mate, but insists on its relevance as a part of larger retail media solutions.

Regarding the payment aspect, it was interesting to see that some suppliers were pushing the reasoning a bit further in terms of leveraging existing online e-commerce capabilities and the need for modernization in stores, by merging the payment experience online and offline (in other words, processing instore customers’ payments through the same platform of online customers). Adyen’s technology, or the “smart checkout” from Vivawallet, a European neo-bank, were two good examples.

Monitoring your store through the eyes of your computer

Smart checkout (or cashier-less stores) is in most cases powered by computer vision (a technology that enables machines to see and understand images and videos), which explains why this part of the business was also quite visible at Euroshop, given the keen interest for smart checkout. However, computer vision is now central to many more applications:

-    Retail heat maps, showing visual representations of customer behaviour and preferences in stores, and footfall analysis tools, to understand customer traffic patterns, peak hours, dwell time, and conversion rates. They can help retailers optimize store layouts, product placements, merchandising, and marketing strategies. Going further, the combination of computer vision with AI allows some suppliers to propose on-shelf availability improvement tools with real-time fulfilment, such as Envelope OU.

-    Image recognition, or the ability to recognize objects, brands, logos, faces, emotions, etc. in images and videos. It can help retailers enhance customer experience, loyalty, personalization, security, and analytics. For instance, Blimp proposes a technology that is able to recognize uniforms in order to exclude salespersons from real-time analysis of the store.

-    Virtual mirrors coupled with recommendation engines allow customers to try on clothes or accessories in fitting rooms and receive personalized recommendations based on customer preferences, style, or body shape.

Computer vision does not only mean equipping the store with cameras and physical sensors, but combining any device and system interacting with the customer to make sense of the data collected, as proposed by various suppliers such as InPiazza, combining data collected from cameras, Wi-Fi routers, beacons, sensors and databases, to provide real-time analytics, reporting and marketing activities.

Given the importance of this topic and the jungle of suppliers available in this field, we will closely collaborate with our partner Retail Hub in order to identify the most valuable potential partners and their competitive advantages over their peers.

Three interesting examples of AI applied to off-the-shelf solutions

AI is all the rage in the media since OpenAI released ChatGPT, which acted as an eye opener not only for individuals but for businesses also. We have recently attended a conference held by Bain, which announced a strategic alliance with OpenAI, and will release our report on this conference soon. The current state of the market implies that retailers have two possibilities when addressing AI:

-    Either as a built-in feature in their core operative model (as suggested by the OpenAI and Bain alliance), with the associated costs and risks, and any CEO who had to reinvent their ERP system would easily draw a parallel in terms of benefits – risks aspects,

-    Or as a product feature already integrated in a specific tool addressing a special and well identified need. The key selling point when it comes to these proposals is usually the ease of implementation (edging to plug & play) and return on investment in terms of time saved.

Falling into the second category, we came across three different examples:

-    Velou, which acts as an automated co-pilot for e-commerce, reviews each category and product performance in real-time and produces reports, but also identifies missing product metadata, suggests new products additions and generates product descriptions automatically, adapting the tone to the platform (mail, social media, website) and profile.

-    Miros, a ‘wordless search tool’ for fashion brands. AI analyses browsing behaviour and past searches and then translates the results of this analysis into product suggestions based on untold words. Given the fact that, for instance, the OpenAI GPT-3 model is based on guessing the next word to write, the Miros solution is a commercial application of this feature and is already used by online retailers such as Debenhams.

-    Brame, which is in the very specific niche of gamification and allows retailers to easily (and quickly) design and produce games for customers, in order to generate interactive experiences and, hopefully, increased loyalty and conversion rates.

Interestingly, in all three cases, AI was advertised at the same time as a key feature of the product, but also as a reason for extremely easy implementation within existing systems, Miros even mentioning being as sensible to implement as Google Analytics.

Retailers have an increasing number of practical options when it comes to sustainability

Sustainability is a major topic in retail, and this is the reason why the IADS dedicated its 2022 White Paper to it. At EuroShop, there were many stands presenting new solutions to enhance sustainability at the point of sales level, and what was interesting was the variety of options available. Of course, many exhibitors advertised their energy-saving lighting systems, sustainable material for shopfitting (such as UCGE), or other virtuous initiatives. But what we found interesting was how existing technologies or customer-facing devices were re-invented with sustainability in mind.

For instance, RFID-specialist Checkpoint Systems advertised its solution for reusable packaging, suggesting that it could help trace packaging consumption and waste, inform customers, but also potentially help set up a deposit refund process in order to encourage customers to return their packaging (to be used again).

Reverse vending machine manufacturers Tomra, Envipco or Recyclever advertised the new capabilities of their devices to be able to recognize (thanks to machine learning) the waste returned in bulk in their machines, and separate it by typology, easing waste sorting, in order to create a recycling loop. While department stores are not the usual place where people would bring back their waste to have it sorted and recycled, such machines would nonetheless be advertising their commitment to sustainability while also helping clean waste in their food halls or F&B zones.

There are many other lessons learnt during this visit, and IADS will continue to review them with Retail Hub, in order to keep providing interesting, up-to-date and relevant content on innovation to IADS members. As a closing thought, it was interesting to note that, just like at the NRF event, Retail Media, which is an omnipresent topic in the media (as it is seen as the future for margin-strapped retailers), was under-represented at EuroShop. This suggests that while everyone is aware of its importance and potential, there are not yet any actual off-the-shelf solutions for players, so they are unable to develop this capability in-house by themselves.

See you in 2026 EuroShop!

Credits: IADS (Selvane Mohandas du Ménil)