Retailers are on a new hope with countries all over the world grounding to relax the lockdown restrictions. The gradual lifting of the restrictions will allow the retailers to be back in the game. But, things have changed now a lot from the time prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. The pandemic had such a huge impact on the retailers that it is estimated the sales of consumer products has declined more than 50% during the lockdown in India and there is a loss approximating to 2.1 trillion USD across the globe. The biggest question now is how the retail market is going to recover.
Researchers and developers from many countries are of the viewpoint that getting insights from retail analytics using spatial data could be of really great help in making decisions on reopening of the retail stores.
Unacast Inc. a US based company is helping many organisations with verified human mobility data which will help them to track infectious diseases and help them with their strategies. Human mobility insights are created by combining location data, map data, and computational power which helps retailers to come up with better products and business decisions.
Unacast recently introduced Retail Impact Scoreboard, a tool to help businesses with vital data on human mobility consisting of comparisons of foot traffic of consumers in pre Covid-19 days and present days. These insights could be really important for the retailers on making decisions on where and when to reopen the stores and analysing the risks involved with it. Identifying real time human behaviour along with the socio-economic and financial trends could really quicken the recovery process.
Analysing digital transaction data of customers during the lockdown is a key technique for understanding the consumer behaviour post the Covid-19. The predictions from analysis of different data sources and many surveys conducted are indicating that most people will continue to avoid buying from malls and supermarkets even after the restrictions are lifted.
Finally, there are also location-visualisation tools which gives insights into the Covid-19 affected areas, helping to map their stores in vicinity to those areas and helping to compute the population density and level of disease contagion to be taken into account before making any decisions on reopening.
