“The key to improving the customer experience is to understand the customer,” said Greg Girard, program director, Merchandise Strategies, IDC Retail Insights. “Analytic solutions that help retailers gain insight into their customers’ buying patterns lay the foundation for a deeper understanding and make it possible to create a personalized shopping experience while optimizing profitability.”

Payment-as-a-service solutions are also empowering merchants and boosting sales. VeriFone's SAIL service lets retailers make secure transactions with nothing but a free app and mobile card reader. For merchants with higher volumes and multiple locations, SAIL offers integration with traditional VeriFone countertop devices that support EMV smartcard, NFC contactless, mobile wallet, and more. SAIL also includes tools to manage inventory,  and connect with customers through social media and digital couponing. The prices are also extremely competitive. Lower-volume businesses can opt for a flat 2.7 percent fee for swiped transactions, while those with higher volumes may select a monthly $9.95 subscription with a discounted 1.95 percent transaction fee.

Advanced Advertising

Pushing the edge of communications has always been an integral part of advertising—good advertising anyway. Solution providers like BlackArrow want to help broadcasters keep their advertising revenues through innovations like inserting ads in on-demand content. Time Warner Cable recently tapped BlackArrow to insert real-time, dynamic ad insertion in on-demand content.

Amdocs is beta testing a tool which integrates shopping with social networks and smart TV video. In the Amdocs demonstration, developers showed how a viewer can watch an episode of a favorite television program—this demo featured “Entourage”—see a fancy phone on screen, get an offer to buy one just like it, buy it, and post a message to a social media account about buying it all without ever missing a second of Ari Gold's latest rant. The technology also “learns” your product preferences so it gets better at offering you only the stuff you want.

Communications technology is advancing in leaps and bounds and will likely surpass our wildest expectations in a handful of years. Who know, we may even see teleportation some day (easy, Trekkies). But the most mundane of tasks—selling stuff to people they didn't know they want—is driving some of the most innovative and sophisticated of opportunities for service providers everywhere. Depressing? Hardly. There's plenty of shopping left to do.