Today big chain stores are facing many problems like high real estate prices, expensive and impossible to find staff etc. These problems are directly reflected in the consumer experience of these big retail chains.  Cost of opening a new store has gone up, so the size of new stores are smaller which means lesser variety of products available.  Also as the number of staff per store has went down, the customer experience of shopping in these stores has also went down, as sometimes there is no staff to attend a customer or the customer has to find one staff to raise his/her query. Also, these challenges faced by big retail chains are increasing their operating cost and at the same time lowering their profit margin.

On Convenience front, the consumer couldn’t shop in underwear at 2.30am, as they could with online stores; they need to take out spare time to shop from their busy life schedules. Also, due to increasing cost retail chains can’t offer low price any longer. These challenges have lead to online shopping patterns which are becoming very famous nowadays. In most of the cases there is only one or two intermediaries is involved in complete online business model. In Online shopping model with the advancement of the Information and Technology, the information available on the online platform is much higher. This leads to one possibility in the future that consumer may not buy online but will be very informed about the products and their availability before he lands to the store.

There may be introduction of full-body scanners and kiosks where one can search what’s in the store and even purchase through that. Those sorts of things will make their way due to interactive features, fast selection and time saving elements.
Why go through all the effort of picking out a dress and trying it on, only to find out that it doesn’t suit you at all? With a body scanner, you could theoretically try on several dresses in several colours before deciding to pick it up off the shelf.

It’s also been floated that scanning kiosks could be stored in public areas and once your image has been scanned, you can order clothes from the scanning company’s collection, raising the prospect that one day you could walk into a retail store no bigger than a telephone booth which contains absolutely no clothes.