The customer at the till doesn’t know whether the problem is the payment terminal, broadband line, network provider or cloud application. They don’t care either. They only know the queue has stopped moving.
The colleague behind the counter apologises, tries the card machine again, looks for another terminal and hopes the customer doesn’t abandon the basket altogether.
That’s the reality of retail connectivity. It’s rarely noticed when it works, but the moment it slows down, everything gets harder: payments, stock checks, click-and-collect, loyalty, colleague devices, customer wifi, security tools and even store openings.
And what’s more, this issue isn’t black and white. A store can be technically online and still deliver a poor experience. Payments may be available but slow. Guest wifi may fail when a shopper needs to load a discount code. Stock systems may run but return unreliable information. A dashboard may show green while the shop floor is already feeling the strain.
But in complexity and confusion hides an opportunity. Gamma solutions director Richard McPhee puts the potential advantage clearly: “I’m not sure if it’s the thing that sets you apart, but it’s certainly the thing that would set you up for success.” Nobody chooses a retailer because they admire its connectivity, but they may leave one because it gets in the way.
The store is doing a different job now
A shop is still a place to sell products, but it’s also a fulfilment hub, returns desk, stock visibility point, service centre, security environment and local expression of the brand. Gamma operations director Thomas Connelly says many retailers know what they want their stores to become, but not always how to get there.
“They know that when they go into their competitors, they’ve got things like digital shelf edge, body cams and wireless cameras,” he says. “But they don’t necessarily understand how they can get there.”
That’s where ambition can run ahead of infrastructure. For example, a bodycam can support colleague safety whilst digital shelf-edge labels can improve price accuracy. At the same time, better POS can speed up service, but every new tool adds pressure to the same network.
Connelly says retailers should start with the role each store needs to play. “What’s the end goal?” he asks. “What are you trying to achieve?”
A convenience retailer focused on quick basket conversion won’t need the same network as a destination store trying to keep customers browsing for longer. A retailer with cafés, appointments or service counters may place more weight on guest wifi and colleague tools, while a high-volume store may care most about payment resilience at peak.
There isn’t one perfect retail network. There’s only the one that matches the store’s job. The problem is that many networks were built for an older version of retail. “The last time they refreshed the network, Deliveroo didn’t exist,” Connelly says. “Guest wifi was functional, but people didn’t expect to go in with their mobiles and sit there and have a coffee and really consume the bandwidth. That just didn’t exist.”
Now it does.
When ‘online’ isn’t enough
Retailers often talk about downtime as though failure is obvious. The system is either working, or it isn’t. Yet as the shop floor knows, it’s rarely that simple.
A payment terminal that takes too long to authorise still creates a queue. A stock check that lags still frustrates a colleague. A clunky customer wifi journey still pushes a shopper back onto weak mobile signal. A click-and-collect system that updates slowly still makes someone wait.
“It’s not just a circuit is up, the lights are green, everything’s good,” Connelly says.
The damage often shows up in ways that are hard to measure. McPhee gives the example of a customer walking into a store needing to check what they were asked to buy. Their phone signal drops. They try the store wifi, but the sign-up process is clunky or doesn’t work. Instead of browsing and adding to the basket, they buy the bare minimum and leave.
“You just get angry to the point where you just do the bare minimum shop and walk out,” he says. “That’s lost basket, just because you created a frustrating experience.”
That lost basket may never appear neatly in a report. The shopper might not complain or abandon a tracked online transaction. They simply spend less, leave sooner or choose another retailer next time.
Payment issues are easier to see. Research from Retail Economics found payment system failures put up to £1.7 billion in annual UK retail and hospitality sales at risk, with retail accounting for £1.2 billion of that exposure.
UK businesses reported an average of 5.2 major payment disruptions a year, with 72 per cent taking place during peak trading periods.
“The broadband line might be up, but actually no one can make a payment, in which case the customer’s leaving the basket on the shelf and walking out the door,” Connelly says.
Green dashboards don’t prove the store can trade
Traditional monitoring can give retailers a false sense of security. It may show that a site is connected, a circuit is live and key services are available, but that doesn’t prove the store is trading well.
Connelly describes the old model as: “If these things are green, it’s probably okay.” The problem is “probably”.
A retailer needs to know whether payment performance is healthy on a busy Saturday, whether applications are responsive, whether devices are behaving as expected and whether customers can use the services they’ve been promised.
It’s here where observability becomes vital. “What observability gives us now is just that end-to-end view of the actual performance, the actual user experience,” Connelly says, “rather than just hoping that things are fine.”
The issue isn’t always a sudden outage. Sometimes performance gets worse slowly.
“Some things degrade over time,” Connelly says. “It’s not all of a sudden, it was working today and it’s not working tomorrow. Some things can just get noticeably slower and slower and slower.”
By the time a service fails, the warning signs may already have been there. For retailers, the challenge is knowing what normal looks like before the shop floor starts feeling the pain.
Retailers need confidence, not more complexity
The argument for stronger retail networks isn’t really about technology, but confidence.
Can the store open on time? Can customers pay? Can colleagues trust their devices? Can stock data be relied on? Can safety tools connect when they’re needed? Can IT teams spot problems before customers do?
Retailers are already asking more of their stores than ever before. They’re adding fulfilment, returns, local delivery, richer service, smarter security, better data and more connected tools. Every new customer promise needs something underneath it.
Faster payment, better availability, smoother click-and-collect, safer stores and more productive colleagues all depend on systems working quietly in the background.
The network may not be the reason a customer walks into a store. But it helps decide whether they can pay, collect, return, browse, get help and leave happy.
