By DAPHNE LEPRINCE-RINGUET

What was the last item you bought online? You probably won’t have to think too far back. Browsing for new headphones on Amazon or buying a 10-pack of socks in one click off ASOS: it seems as natural today as going to the nearest tailor would have been decades ago. Shopping is increasingly happening online, and for an industry like retail – worth £366 billion last year in the UK – the implications are big.

While retail sales are looking healthy, with a growth of nearly five per cent year on year in August, saying that the relationship between retailers and consumers has changed would be an understatement. New technologies and innovations such as the transition to digital have transformed the nature of shopping. This week, at WIRED Smarter, we looked at how retail is set to change.

From sustainable brands to the use of AI: here are six things that we learned

The future is sustainable

We live in the age of circular economy, recycling materials instead of letting them go to waste at the end of their life. It’s an upcoming trend in retail, according to Kresse Wesling from luxury fashion brand Elvis & Kresse. Wesling started her company as a way to tackle a ten-million-tonnes-a-year problem in London. That’s the combined weight of all the fire hoses that need to be disposed of every year in the capital. She turned them into luxury products and then tackled leather waste.

“One tonne of leather costs £410 to bury in the ground,” she says. “Transform it into our system, and it will be worth a £100,000 product.” Wesling’s company is a Certified B Corporation: an organisation that meets a certain standard of environmental sustainability. And she certainly believes those are the companies of the future.

Innovation will help retailers stay relevant

Retailers are still relevant – but they can be left lagging behind new customer expectations, suffering from the difficulty of launching new products fast enough. “In the current climate, speed is all that matters,” says Kerry Liu, CEO of Rubikloud.

“New projects used to be carried out in one or two years – they should be carried out in one or two quarters.” The solution? Artificial intelligence – a tool that can give retailer insight into inventories, financial forecasts or technological skill.

We won’t have to think about cash anymore

People love spending but often hate thinking about paying. The process can be messy and take too long. Florence Diss, head of EMEA partnerships at Google, sees the solution as a unified commerce experience for retailers. This means giving users the opportunity to leverage the payment details they have already provided for third parties, in a digital wallet.

“Look at Uber,” she says, “where users pay without even knowing. They’ve effectively made payment invisible. That seamlessness should happen when we pay in store, when we pay online, when we pay in every possible situation.” And when it comes to making spending easier, it is likely that entrepreneurs won’t be short of innovative ideas.

The consumer will be king

“Everything we do needs to be done for the customer, to remove friction – whether that means integrating Google Pay or working with startups to develop technologies we don’t have the capacity to work on ourselves,” says ASOS’s chief information officer Cliff Cohen. That is good news for shoppers: they are now making the rules of innovation. That is why ASOS is working, for instance, towards integrating a recommendation chatbot within its online platform. The technology is beyond the retailer’s technical capacity, so the company has teamed up with a startup called Action.ai - all with the goal of making customer experience better. And so, consumers take the lead.

Zero friction will be the new norm

If the retailers of tomorrow fail to listen to the needs of their consumers, and more importantly to keep up with their ever-increasing expectations of a shopping experience that is completely seamless, that will be the end of their businesses. Because consumers don’t like friction – in fact, it is estimated that two thirds of consumer dropouts when buying a smartphone are caused by a bad bad consumer experience.

In 2017, UK shoppers were three times more likely to get a bad customer experience than they were the year before, according to Facebook’s group director Martin Harbech. “That’s not because retail has got worse,” he continues. “It’s because expectations are rising incredibly fast.” To survive, companies will have to keep up with the standards set for customers by the top brand in the field. And the way to do so is to completely remove friction from the shopping experience - “become friction-obsessed,” is Harbech’s tough advice.

It is not the end of physical shops

It’s not all about online payments and chatbots. Emilie Colker, executive director at IDEO, strongly believes in the future of physical shopping. Except the stores of the future, she says, will step away from being places of pure transaction, to being places where retailers build a relationship with shoppers. “Future retail is moving from transactional to relational,” says Colker. “Brands will use the offline space to create more opportunities for people to connect with the products.”

A typical example of a digital brand exploiting the potential of the physical world is The Dreamery by Casper in New York City. The sleep company opened a shop where consumers can book a 45-minute nap to try out the mattresses before they buy them. This allows consumers, says Colker, to contextualise the way they might buy a product. Machine-learning and digital tools may help retailers learn more about their customers’ needs; but focusing on creating relationships with people will still be a key concern for brands. And the physical world is where that will happen.

The retail startups you need to watch

Winner of the WIRED Smarter Startup Showcase competition and fervent defender of sustainability, Olio seems to confirms Wesling’s predictions for a circular economy. “50 per cent of waste in the UK takes place in the household,” says its co-founder Saasha Celestial-One. “So we are collectively responsible for the problem.” To tackle it, she created a shared app that users can browse to collect leftover food in neighbouring households. Users simply upload the food they don't have a use for – for instance, if they've purchased too much or aren't going to use it – and someone local takes it off their hands. Olio is also working with retailers to reduce waste food they have. To a collective problem, a collective solution.

Swipii: The company has set to close the gap between “offline” businesses and digital ones. “The first are operating decades behind the latter,” says co-founder Louis Schena. “And they are usually small and medium private businesses that need easy solutions to access data.” Swipii lets you link a card to local businesses and earn points with every pound you spend to get rewards in local shops.

Divido: co-founded by Christer Holloman, the firm is a pay-later platform for customers. The app works with retailers to allow customers to spread the cost of purchases over several months while paying retailers immediately.

Soda Says: is a startup seeking to demystify tech for women by using data-driven supply chains. Based on the observation that consumer electronics have not been addressing female demand. “‘Shrink it and pink it’ is not the way to go,” says founder Grace Gould. The company is hoping to combat the stereotype that women are not early adopters of tech. The consumer will be queen.

WeVat: falls into the “seamless payment” category. It simplifies tax refunds by letting tourists upload pictures of their receipts and then automatically filling VAT refund forms for them. “A step forward from the endless and countless forms that currently have to be filled at the airport and that are far removed from the smooth experience you’d want from luxury shopping in Paris,” says co-founder Dmitry Ivanov.