Survey Reveals Retailers' Top Tech-Related Challenges

As part of Total Retail's recently released 2023 Retail Technology Report: An Analysis of Trends, Buying Behaviors, and Future Opportunities, survey respondents were asked to identify the top challenges when implementing a new technology into their businesses. While investing in technology and innovation is critical for retailers and brands to remain competitive, such initiatives do not come without challenges. The below chart illustrates the level to which these challenges are most pervasive and detrimental to the business.

When retailers are evaluating technology solutions and their potential investment in them, they must carefully examine how such a solution would complement its existing tech stack, including how easily it integrates with existing systems. According to our survey, too many retailers are struggling with this. For the second consecutive year, “integrating with existing technology” was the most frequently cited challenge for retailers when implementing a new technology into their business. Perhaps more troubling is that the percentage of respondents choosing this jumped from 61 percent in 2022 to 75 percent in this year’s survey.

Next on the list of challenges is training staff on new tech solutions. With the volatility we’ve seen in the labor market, including many retailers reporting challenges filling open roles within their IT teams, it’s both new technologies and a lack of people that are hamstringing retailers’ implementation efforts. A potential solution to this challenge is finding a true vendor partner, one that’s there to provide support both during the onboarding and implementation process as well as throughout the lifetime of your contract.

What Retailers Had to Say About Their Tech Challenges

The respondents elaborated on their biggest challenge when implementing a new technology into their business in an open-ended follow-up question. Here are some of their responses:

• Because things rapidly change it can be difficult integrating newer things with our older software. But the older software is paid for, so we don’t want to upgrade unless we absolutely have to.
• Since COVID-19 vendor support is limited to online chat, community forums and email responses. Sometimes talking to an actual person is a lot quicker.
• Staff training will be at some form of cost. Not in the budget.
• Important facets of present technology are not “up-to-date” and cost factor(s) to implement with new technology are causing challenges to do the same.
• Ripple effect. ROI and even vendor support are a challenge but still a challenge in a vacuum; understanding and strategizing the rest of the ecosystem impact is a struggle in any org to have the right people/departments at the table and putting aside personal stakes.
• Integration. Cost would perhaps be the more logical concern, but software integration is huge. If it doesn’t work well and as close to seamless as possible, then nothing else matters.
• Seamless integration into our existing tech stack is always tricky. Solutions are never as plug and play as they promise.

For more in-depth survey data as well as analysis of what it means for the retail industry at large, download the 2023 Retail Technology Report: An Analysis of Trends, Buying Behaviors, and Future Opportunities report.