In this interview at the NRF17 Retail's Big Show I spoke with Stefan Weitz, Chief Product and Strategy officer of Radial, the supply chain and software provider to retailers.
If you're a retailer in today's world you practically have two paths you can take: be afraid of Amazon and the technology revolution it spearheads, or embrace it and use it to your advantage (recommended!).
And if you want to embrace change but not be dwarfed by Amazon and other ecomemrce players there are specific capabilities and service you have to provide to your customers. A key part of this is the distribution and delivery aspect which can be time consuming and expensive, and which Amazon is so good at. Adding software and staying current with other technologies make retailers' jobs even more challenging.
But all hope is not lost! Many retailers are not only embracing technology but also using it uniquely to fit their business model and in the process becoming successful. And an important part of this process is working with the right partners, specifically technology partners. The next question is just how many partners does a retailer want to work with. Working with partners is great but every relationship takes time to setup and to maintain, so as a general rule of business the more services and assistance you can get from a trusted partner the easier you life will be, and your margins can also benefit in the process.
One of the few companies which can and does provide a wide range of services and products to large retailers is Radial. As in my previous interview with Stefan Weitz, the CSO of Radial at Shoptalk 2016 Radial was born from the divestiture of Ebay Enterprise in 2016, with Radial taking the name and products related to supply chain, and Magento focusing on the commerce platform originally created under that brand.
In the process Radial has been working on adding more capabilities on top of the products they inherited from Ebay Enterprise, and in a short few monts they have release 3 new ones in Jan including:
- Radial Order Management (ROM),
- 0.5 million additional square feet of distribution capacity, for a total of 13.5 M, and
- A new partner program to help customrs and prospects implement and innovate faster and easier on the Radial platform.
In this interview with Stefan at NRF17 we talk about the new offering as well as a few important parts of the Retail formula including the personalization aspect, online-to-offline synergies and a few more (including my question about a Radial Blimp)
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