28 oct. 2025
Austria’s Retail Wake-Up Call: Where the Industry Must Accelerate Now
*original article featured in Der Standard, 28.10.2025
Retailers in Austria face an urgent challenge: redesign their stores to offer competitive prices and modern services despite limited staffing. While Scandinavia, France, and Germany are racing ahead with seamless journeys, strong loyalty programs, and automated processes, many Austrian chains are still stuck in the pre-digital lane. The cost? Time, money, and sometimes the customer.
Travelling through local stores today, two things become apparent: long queues at the checkout and outdated workflows.
Cut Costs, Kill Complexity
International benchmarks are clear: productivity and customer satisfaction rise when store processes are designed end-to-end with digital in mind. The biggest lever sits on the storefront, where margins are won or lost: handling goods, shelf service, inventory, loss prevention, and checkout.
Streamlined operations allow for competitive pricing and free up staff for higher-value tasks. Optimization is the new core competency. Retailers who invest in connected processes today will be better able to balance price pressure, staffing constraints, and customer experience, and will be more competitive against international peers.
Moving Teams Where Value Happens
Staff shortages raise the stakes. Store managers must juggle rosters, while qualified staff is hard to find. Meanwhile, the aisles need greater presence where value is created: at the shelves, fresh food counters, and customers—not just at the registers.
Automation counts where minutes matter: smart shelf labels, digital inventory, and self-checkout reduce routine workload. The goal isn’t to have fewer people; it’s to make better use of the people you have.
Goodbye Lanes, Hello Flow: Checkout, Anywhere
Global leaders are redefining the final destination. Checkout becomes a function, not a physical location. Traditional checkout lanes are disappearing as payment moves to smartphones or directly to smart shopping carts via "PIN on glass" (NFC). Shoppers can scan items, redeem discounts, and pay themselves without reloading items onto a belt.
The result: no queues, less space devoted to fixed cash registers, and a more predictable flow during peak times.
shopreme snap cart Smart Shopping Cart solution
Price Pressure: Win with Better Processes
Price remains the market’s strongest signal. After years of inflation, consumers pay closer attention to basket value and fairness than ever. If costs aren’t under control, pricing flexibility disappears.
This is where process and checkout innovation converge: the more seamlessly operations integrate, the easier it is to maintain competitive prices.
Transparency That Converts
Displaying the live basket total, discounts, and loyalty benefits in real time allows shoppers to make clearer choices and redeem offers on the spot, often increasing their basket size.
Meanwhile, shrinkage is addressed quietly in the background. Intelligent software checks if items and movement patterns match and triggers targeted spot checks instead of random interventions. The result: fewer staff interruptions, less shrinkage, and a smoother experience.
In short, Austria’s retail sector must move faster. Streamline processes, ease the pressure on checkout zones, and leverage data effectively to avoid falling behind.
Orchestrating the Digital Shift
wirecube’s Principles for Digital Transformation
Anyone running stores knows the bottlenecks: legacy system landscapes, piecemeal loyalty digitalization, isolated point solutions—and too little time to connect it all properly. At the same time, customers expect a truly omnichannel experience: consistent pricing and services, plus clean digital handoffs between stores and apps.
Stefan Kern, CEO wirecube & Florian Burgstaller, CEO shopreme
Field Notes from Projects
“Many retailers are operationally strong but not yet sufficiently integrated technologically,” says Stefan Kern, CEO of Graz-based wirecube.
Kern sees three recurring patterns:
Core processes are outdated.
Critical workflows run outside a shared data model.
Clear, reliable interfaces are missing.
His takeaway: “Technology only solves problems when it fits the operation.”
Regarding the "AI versus traditional digitalization" debate, Kern maintains a practical approach:
"We use what works. Sometimes that’s AI, but often it’s solid integration, automation, or disciplined process design. The method is secondary; what counts is the value on the storefront.”
One current project with a top North German drugstore chain demonstrates how a central cloud platform can unify various data sources, including ERP, loyalty, customer data, offers, and coupons, into a single system.
Shoppers receive personalized deals and consistent services across the app and store, as well as frictionless access to promotions. For the retailer, this approach unlocks faster, data-driven operations and provides a foundation for quickly rolling out new services.
Unburden Teams, Connect Systems
The path forward is clear: embrace digital transformation to stabilize costs and maintain service quality. wirecube supports strategic planning and integration.
The next step: addressing overloaded checkout zones. shopreme, a successful wirecube spin-off, takes an ecosystem approach: Scan & Go, Smart Carts, and more are plugged into existing systems and are fully integrated across online and offline channels. This is exactly the kind of architecture that replaces silos and scales.
Checkout in the Hot Seat
“We often hear the concern that self-checkout and AI will replace retail staff,” says Florian Burgstaller, CEO of shopreme, global leader in Scan & Go technology.
Relief, Not Redundancies
“In practice we see the opposite. With Europe’s staffing shortages, front-line teams gain time for advice, freshness, and availability. AI primarily helps with loss prevention.”
Whether shoppers check out on their smartphones or on a Smart Cart, payment happens within the shopping flow. Queues become the exception, and peak times smooth out without adding more manned tills.
shopreme mobile Scan & Go solution
Integration Helps Prices, Too
“We work with retailers worldwide and generate an export ratio of over 80%. From those projects we know that integrated checkout and data processes positively affect the cost curve,” says Burgstaller.
Self-checkout also saves valuable floor space and embeds advanced loss prevention. Well-designed operating models reduce structural costs, creating headroom for more competitive pricing.
Personalization at the point of sale further cushions margins. Product placements on cart displays or smartphones appear at the exact moment of decision, are measurable via POS data, and create new revenue streams from Retail Media ads.
When technology streamlines processes, minimizes losses, and generates additional Retail Media revenue, price levels stabilize—not just theoretically, but in day-to-day operations.
What matters most to retailers? Broad relief for checkout areas and incremental revenue from Retail Media.
“Smart Carts deliver measurable gains in throughput and margin, while shoppers get a personal assistant in the aisle,” Burgstaller notes.
Conclusion: Compete by Re-thinking the Store
Whether Austria’s retailers are ready to leave old structures behind and redesign processes will determine more than efficiency; It will decide their competitiveness.
