Looking for new ways to sell into the retail vertical? Don’t start with just a list of technologies. Instead, consider what retailers truly prioritize and ask yourself what tech-related risks they might be overlooking.
Most retailers share the same main goals:
- Earning revenue
- Growing their business
To meet those objectives, many retailers are exchanging brick-and-mortar storefronts for a “distributed” business model. But while pop-up shops, food trucks, and ghost kitchens provide exciting revenue opportunities, they also present connectivity and security challenges.
How can retailers establish a resilient internet connection? And how should they think about physical and digital security?
Even when retailers ask these questions, they don’t always know the right answers, and many make critical mistakes. Helping retailers identify the risks they’re overlooking is a core component of selling into the retail vertical.
“Retail leaders often focus on visible, immediate threats such as shrink, labor constraints, and rising operating costs. Less visible, but often more damaging, are the technology risks embedded in legacy infrastructure decisions.” states Intelisys supplier partner, Lumen. “Fragmented networks, minimal real‑time visibility across store locations, and failure‑prone connectivity can quietly disrupt transactions, supply chain coordination, and customer experience long before issues escalate to outages.”
These potential oversights provide a great opening for discovery conversations with retail leaders. Then, as the discussion shifts to solutions, it’s best to offer a suite of interrelated tools and capabilities, or a “blended solution”, rather than individual products. This allows you to present yourself as an all-encompassing problem-solver, helping retailers address all their tech needs through a single relationship.
Below, we describe retailers’ IT blind spots in greater detail, while also guiding sales partners towards more fruitful retail conversations.
What Retailers Care About Most
Every type of business has its own main concerns. In some industries, compliance is a major preoccupation. In others, efficiency is key. For retailers, the main objective is to ensure systems remain online so that sales can keep happening, and revenue can keep flowing in.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of retailers’ central concerns:
- Uptime. When a retailer’s digital systems go offline, the damage is immediate and devastating. Payment systems go dark, sales come to a halt, and customers walk away angry. Providing sufficient backups to avoid network outages is a business-critical need for modern retailers.
- Revenue protection. Revenue is the lifeblood of any retailer. When it starts to dry up, the business struggles to meet fixed expenses (like rent or utilities), and the whole operation threatens to go under. Digital systems need to be designed in a way that protects revenue from potential dangers, including network outages and ransomware attacks.
- Security. For many retailers, security begins and ends with PCI compliance—staying compliant to keep card payments flowing and avoid fines, fees, or disruptions. But compliance is not the same as security. PCI defines minimum requirements; it does not account for every risk introduced by mobile locations, shared networks, or employee‑owned devices.
- Scalability. Every retailer’s dream is to scale, turning that one store or food truck into a chain of cobranded businesses. Digital infrastructure should be built with this objective in mind. Fiber cables, for example, can’t suddenly serve additional business locations, but wireless networks can. That’s one reason why SD-WAN is generally recommended for retailers, even those that currently operate out of a single location.
Retailers’ Most Common Mistakes
Retail business owners are often experts in their specific areas of focus, whether that be selling tie-dye t-shirts or homemade empanadas, but when it comes to outfitting their business with the right tech stack, many are prone to mistakes.
Lumen offers, “One of the most common mistakes retailers make is narrowing discovery conversations to circuit speeds or monthly costs instead of business continuity, application performance, and recovery time when links fail. Platforms such as Lumen® SD‑WAN and Lumen Network Services, for example, are designed to support this broader perspective by enabling centralized visibility, traffic prioritization, and policy‑based control across distributed retail footprints.”
By addressing the following misunderstandings and oversights, you can help retail clients improve their operations, enhance their security, and protect their much-needed revenue.
Relying on a Single Internet Connection
Many retailers believe that once they’ve installed a reliable internet connection, their connectivity needs are “handled”. What’s often overlooked is that a single connection, no matter how fast or reputable the provider, creates a single point of failure.
There’s a lot that can disrupt connectivity in a distributed retail environment, including congestion, physical damage, local outages, and issues with third‑party infrastructure – all of which are outside the retailer’s control. Whatever the cause, once the connection fails, operations are effectively brought to a halt.
From a business perspective, that failed connection means:
- Payments can’t be processed.
- Digital workflows break down.
- Service slows or halts.
- Customers walk away.
The risk here isn’t theoretical. Without redundancy, retailers leave themselves exposed to outages that have a direct impact on revenue.
Treating Wireless Backup as “Nice to Have”
Even when retailers acknowledge the risk of outages, they often hesitate to prioritize backup connectivity. Outages feel unlikely, infrequent, or manageable (until they actually happen, of course).
This mindset typically rests on two (false) assumptions:
- “It probably won’t happen.”
- “We’ll figure it out if it does.”
In reality, outages tend to expose that “playing it by ear” is a recipe for disaster. Manual workarounds result in much slower service, which leaves employees stressed and customers frustrated. And in mobile or pop‑up environments, lost transactions are rarely recoverable once customers move on.
Leaving Mobile Devices Unsecured
As retail operations become more mobile, employees are increasingly likely to access business systems through their personal devices. And in shared or public environments, these devices often connect through networks that retailers don’t control.
This produces several cybersecurity risks:
- Devices can become gateways into payment systems.
- Lost or stolen devices can expose login credentials.
- Public networks can increase the risk of “man in the middle” attacks.
Many retailers don’t recognize this exposure, simply because nothing has gone wrong…yet. But as businesses scale, adding additional employees and completing more transactions, the risk from unsecured endpoints increases.
Thinking of “Digital” and “Physical” Security as Separate Concerns
Ask a typical retailer about “security,” and they’ll respond, “Do you mean physical security, or cybersecurity?” Physical security is the realm of security cameras, locks, and fences, while cybersecurity is all about passcodes, penetration testing, and firewalls – or so most people believe.
In the real world, and especially in the growing space of distributed retail, the lines between cyber and physical risk have been blurred. Today’s retailers are occupying public places and interacting with more and more customers. This modern retail environment increases exposure to:
- Unauthorized (physical) access to devices or networks
- Theft of equipment or credentials
- Gaps between physical and digital controls
In other words, digital systems aren’t safe if physical security isn’t maintained, and physical security is best attained if it’s supported by digital applications.
Key to Success: Mastering the “Blended Solution”
As an Intelisys sales partner, one of the essential advantages you can offer to retailers is the ability to help them secure a blended, integrated IT stack. You have access to the entire Intelisys portfolio, including ScanSource’s full suite of hardware solutions. By working together with the Intelisys team, you can provide end-to-end implementation support.
Ideally, a retailer’s network, POS, and security solutions are all integrated within a single apparatus. The wireless network (with SIM backup) provides the invisible foundation. Hardware components, including POS systems, security cameras, and IoT devices, meet key operational and security objectives, with the underlying network keeping them online. Meanwhile, the right software solutions optimize all of these tools through AI and machine learning.
By delivering this blended solution for retailers, you solve all their IT needs through a single, trusted relationship.
Leading Effective Retail Discovery Conversations
Retailers always understand their underlying priorities: maximizing revenue and enabling future growth. But they don’t always appreciate the importance of IT solutions in helping them achieve those objectives. That’s why discovery conversations are such a vital part of the process when selling into the retail vertical.
“Effective discovery shifts the dialogue toward what retailers care about most—keeping stores operational, transactions flowing, and digital experiences consistent,” provides Lumen, “while uncovering the hidden risks that static, single‑path networks introduce as stores become more connected and data‑driven.”
When meeting a new retailer, try to lead with operational questions, rather than overwhelming them with insider jargon or high-tech solutions. For example, you could ask, “What happens to your business if the internet goes down during peak hours?”. With such a question, you allow pain points to surface naturally. Then, you can follow up with a more solution-heavy conversation.
Also, consider using our retail eBook as a conversation starter: The Invisible Infrastructure of Retail.
Learn More
Ready to take a deeper dive into the retail vertical? Check out our full slate of retail-related resources on our Retail Hub.
You can also reach out to our technical experts with specific questions and further insight into the retail vertical.