Meet You At The Marketplace?

In 2009, Square found a way to turn a mobile phone into a cheap, wireless point of sale device, giving birth to a new payments vocabulary word – mPOS and creating a way for small retailers to accept credit cards. Since then, Square has moved beyond processing just credit cards. It’s branched out to food delivery, even dipping a big toe into the big pool of e-commerce with Square Market, in an effort to further help businesses access a digital marketplace to sell goods online — and reach more customers. It makes sense that a company like Square would want to get a piece of the e-commerce pie with an online marketplace, while at the same time allowing their original mPOS customers to tap into a broader customer base.

Thanks to the growth of options in today’s omnichannel world, it’s not just Square customers who have a variety of platforms to choose from when shopping. From e-commerce to mobile to even the trusty ol’ catalogue, there’s no shortage of options to purchase those necessary goods.

In fact, one might even say that Square is rather late to the omnichannel retail game. Amazon, Alibaba, Rakuten and eBay are examples of four gargantuan marketplaces where consumers, worldwide, can fill their shopping carts with products from a big named retailer — that might not even have a location in their country — to a small mom-and-pop store halfway across the globe, all with a simple click from a laptop, phone or tablet.

While e-commerce has disrupted traditional brick-and-mortar retail, it is not necessarily shutting it down. Thanks to more and more consumers leaning on e-commerce to shop, the digital marketplace has cracked the code on finding success with omnichannel retail.

Beyond the ability to access goods from a retailer that is a plane ride away, today’s global omnichannel marketplace allows consumers to shop how and where they want. And with the growth of mobile shopping, which nearly tripled in 2014 from 2013, consumers have even more options. A customer can fill his or her virtual shopping cart with his or her favorite shampoo using his or her phone while waiting for a coffee, then drive across the street and pick it up from a special section from the company’s store in her neighborhood. Amazon has even found a way to cut out the trips to the grocery store, bringing fresh food to your door — food that was ordered on your computer from your desk at work. You can plan ahead and order your meals a week in advance, or, you can have your food delivered in less than an hour.

So while omnichannel has created a retail world of convenience for shoppers, is omnichannel really the future of retail? Led by Don Kingsborough, an omnichannel pioneer, our panel of experts including executives from eBay, Staples and Rakuten will debate that very question.

It is a fascinating conversation that will only happen at the Innovation Project 2015.

Click here to apply.