IRT Retail Tech Spending Report: Budget For mPOS, Digital Signage, Wi-Fi, Security

By Ally Kutz, contributing writer

Cloud adoption is up, inventory visibility is down, and mobile point of sale (POS) is ever increasing, according to Innovative Retail Technologies’ report Retail Tech Spending 2016: The Digitization Of The Physical Domain. The report, conducted every third quarter of the year since 2005, surveys IRT subscribers on their tech spending plans for the next year.

When asked if they were actively moving applications to the cloud, less than 37 percent of retailers surveyed answered yes for 2015. In this year’s survey, that number has jumped significantly, with 52 percent answering that they are actively moving applications into the cloud.

Inventory visibility as a top priority has been declining since 2012, when 56 percent of retailers responded that they were making inventory visibility their top supply chain spending priority. This year, the number has diminished to 38 percent, with more than 34 percent planning to spend on solutions to improve inventory management through better visibility, and more than 33 percent investing in order management/fulfillment solutions.

Store-level software spending, which primarily targeted mobile device management last year, is shifting this year to wireless networking and Wi-Fi. Almost 33 percent of respondents said they planned to invest in wireless networking and 31 percent in Wi-Fi. POS software followed at about 29 percent.

The top three in-store hardware investments for 2016 according to the survey respondents are mobile POS hardware (35 percent), digital signage (31 percent), and printers (29 percent).

Retailers are also planning on spending on loss prevention/asset protection with the top three LP/AP investment areas of payment security (35 percent), video surveillance (30 percent), and mobile security (27 percent).

For more information on the survey, click here to read IRT senior executive editor Matt Pillar’s article.