2015 Retail Predictions

With 2015 upon us, it's time to evaluate your marketing strategy for the new year. Here are four areas that you want to pay particular attention to:

1. Social will become more shoppable. Thanks to social commerce efforts (e.g., Twitter's "Buy" button) and the launch of solutions such as Soldsie and Like2Buy, merchants will find it easier to sell merchandise via social sites and apps.

TopShelf Boutique, an apparel store in San Francisco, is leveraging social media to drive sales. TopShelf uses Soldsie to enable shoppers to buy products directly through the boutique's Instagram feed. All users need to do is comment "sold" when they see an image of an item they'd like to purchase, and they'll automatically get an email invoice of their order so they can complete checkout.

Expect more of these social selling initiatives to emerge in 2015. Retailers will continue to seek ways to use social media for commerce purposes and more solutions providers will launch services to enable them to do that.

2. Retailers will speed up order fulfillment. Modern consumers expect real-time results from the services they use (e.g., Uber/Lyft for rides on-demand and Netflix/Hulu for shows on-demand), but they've also come to expect the same level of speed when it comes to shopping.

That's why we're expecting merchants to offer faster fulfillment options this year. Same-day delivery and click-and-collect will be "must haves" in 2015, and the retailers that are able to get products into the hands of customers quickly will be the ones that thrive.

We can already see signs of this happening. Macy's, for example, is now marketing its click-and-collect service more aggressively, while Target started testing curbside pickup in San Francisco. Meanwhile, same-day delivery services such as Deliv and We Deliver are growing rapidly.

3. Mobile payments, particularly NFC, will continue to rise. Traditional payment methods won't go away anytime soon, but we'll definitely see more of mobile wallet solutions such as Apple Pay, Softcard, CurrentC and PayPal.

We're predicting that NFC-based payments (e.g., Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Softcard) are nearing the point of widespread adoption thanks in part to Apple. The company put NFC technology on the map when it launched Apple Pay with the support of the biggest U.S. banks and major retailers such as Macy's, Walgreens and Whole Foods.

This, along with the fact that there are millions of iPhone 6 users out there, has encouraged even more retailers to adopt the hardware needed to accept mobile payments.

Continuous improvements to mobile payment technologies will also drive adoption. In 2015, we expect providers to come up with faster and easier ways to use mobile wallets.

A few years ago, for example, customers had to open an app if they wanted to pay with their phones. Now, Apple Pay users won't even have to "wake up" their phones to start the mobile payment process. They can simply hover their phone over the NFC device, and Apple Pay will launch automatically.

Other mobile wallet providers will likely follow suit and further refine their solutions to make payments as frictionless as possible.

4. A majority of retailers will upgrade their in-store technologies this year. Retailers will have plenty of reasons to upgrade their systems in 2015, one of which is the EMV transition in the United States. The country is in the process of switching to EMV (aka chip-and-pin), a more secure payment standard for debit and credit cards, and merchants are urged to upgrade their payment terminals so they can support the technology.

Other retail technologies that are bound to make waves in 2015 include beacons (for in-store analytics and marketing), RFID (for real-time inventory management), and mobile point-of-sale systems (for faster checkout).

Francesca Nicasio is a retail expert and author for Vend, a cloud-based point-of-sale provider.