Those who dared to head out to stores on Friday, the busiest purchasing day of the year, probably didn’t leave home without a smartphone and a few strategic shopping apps. Technology has long influenced how we shop, and technologists are doing their best to make sure that continues. The future of shopping at a store? It looks a lot like shopping online, with personalized suggestions, no waiting and help that pops up out of nowhere when you pause for a few seconds.

In the future, sensors and cameras in stores could alert a store employee’s smart watch that a customer has been waiting for 10 seconds at a dressing room.

Or an in-store screen may suggest gifts that are similar to ones you’ve purchased at the store in the past.

Credit cards? Those are already going away with Apple Pay, which enables iPhones to pay for items without sharing the credit card number with merchants. This year, Android Pay, Samsung Pay and Chase Pay followed suit with their own mobile payment systems.

While there are already concerns with privacy and security, the industry believes that if done right, technology can help consumers shop smarter.

“With the Internet of Things, all the technology is getting baked into products. The company with the brand name in that product will gather data and become part of the journey in that person’s life,” said Jon Nordmark, co-founder of Iterate, a Denver company that scours the globe for technology to help small retailers compete with giants like Amazon and Walmart.

“It can be creepy and that will be the hard part,” Nordmark said. “They have to figure out how to treat the customer with respect and maintain security.”

What else is coming? Here are a few things quite possibly on the way:

Watson goes shopping: Earlier this month, one of the newest shopping apps that relies on big data launched. IBM’s Watson Trend app claims to accurately predict what’s hot by filtering out the noise.

Watson listens to “tens of millions of conversations” on about 10,000 sites, including Twitter, top blogs and reviews on 200 e-commerce sites, said Justin Norwood, IBM’s product strategist for the app. Using natural language technology, Watson figures out why the Internet is buzzing about a product based on understanding the context, tone and meaning. And then Watson gives it a trend score.

Social buzz doesn’t mean, for example, everybody now wants an Apple iMac. But the iMac showed up because, as Watson noticed, people are thinking of ditching the computer for the new iPad Pro.

“The differentiator is we find the story behind the trend,” Norwood said. “What people are really saying.”

The app uses all that data to estimate what will be popular three weeks from now. In the future, IBM wants to predict trends six months in advance, Norwood said. That way, retailers could order enough of the future hot products and arrange their stores appropriately.

Smarter gifting: Where Watson will predict the hot gifts, deep learning will help people buy better gifts for friends, family and themselves.

Deep learning takes all sorts of signals and personal information, such as shopping history and spending, to make gift giving less of a chore. It’s all about you.

“It’s what you want faster,” said Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, a Cambridge, Mass., firm that uses artificial intelligence to connect the right pieces of data to customers. “It’s the discovery of things you don’t know about but fit you well.”

For example, she said, if you’ve purchased baby gifts in the past, a site may suggest similar items to help you along. Or if you clicked on a 50 percent-off ad, the site knows you’re looking for a deal. Signals could also be time of day, location and calendar items, such as an upcoming wedding so you’ll need a new dress.

“Just like a great salesperson in a store would remember what you bought — prices, styles, colors, sizes — and know the context, like that you are now looking for an outfit for a wedding, the algorithms can take you on a similar personalized journey,” Eggers said.

Smart shopping bag: Adding items to a shopping bag and walking out the store’s door today may feel like shoplifting. But tomorrow? Kevin Schaff, founder of Twyst Inc. in Greenwood Village, believes retailers will give smart shopping bags their blessing.

Smarter bags will calculate the items stashed inside and charge a customer’s account as he or she walks out the door. Apple Stores already moved the cash register to the roving employee. Smarter shopping bags could be next.

Customers avoid long lines and check out quickly, and store employees can focus on other tasks, said Schaff, who is working with a large retail firm on testing the bag.

And the bag provides data to the retailer that was previously a benefit of online shopping, such customers who bought this product also bought that product.

“We can feed all that to the consumer or retailer and use big-data analytics to really change the dynamic” of shopping in a store, Schaff said.

Magical mirror: MemoMi Labs in Palo Alto created a smarter dressing-room mirror that essentially is a video screen with a built-in camera. Try on an outfit and spin around and the mirror captures the twirl — and MemoryMirror lets you check out a 360-degree view of it — including how you look from behind. Being digital, the mirror can quickly switch outfit colors so you don’t have to try on the blue and the green ensemble to get the picture.

Neiman Marcus began testing the mirrors in San Francisco stores, where the mirrors include personal password-protected accounts to share videos and store them for future reference.

Neiman’s, meanwhile, gets data on who tried on the clothes and then bought them. The experiment worked so well, the company said it’s rolling out mirrors to 15 more locations, though none yet in Colorado.

Shop global: Overnight, Greenwood Village’s eBags expanded to 220 countries. By partnering with Borderfree, eBags’ website was transformed into the local language and currency of those countries. More importantly, eBags can accept and fill overseas orders. Pitney Bowes-owned Borderfree even takes care of customs and taxes.

Since going global on Nov. 10, eBags co-founder Peter Cobb said that 10 percent of its traffic is now from international visitors.

“Before that, we didn’t have anything” Cobb said. “The initial results are really favorable and that’s with virtually no effort and no marketing to boot.”

While eBags is purely online, the Borderfree deal gives overseas shoppers the option to buy 67,000 different bags and travel items that eBags previously only shipped to U.S. addresses.

Blurring online and offline: Cookies and other trackers know what you left in your online shopping cart. Or they make suggestions based on actual purchases. That experience could soon transfer to in-store shopping.

Getting a mobile alert that a favorite brand’s new shoe line is available at the neighborhood mall, for example, is just the start of the blur. Opt in to the in-store personalization and the store will know when you step inside, how long you linger in the shoe department and if you make a purchase.

That could trigger a second mobile alert for matching accessories or even a promotion code. Or knowing you left a sweater in the store’s online site, a sales person could bring the sweater to you to try it on.

Different companies are working on various ways to blur those lines. IBM’s Presence Insights uses a mix of location awareness, physical in-store sensors and mobile connections to build the personal experience.

And vice versa. Online stores lack the feel of going to a store. IBM is experimenting with ways to blur the lines the opposite direction, such as taking a selfie picture and trying on clothes virtually using augmented reality.

“A consumer’s latest best experience from the retailer becomes the minimum threshold for what to expect,” Norwood said.

Tamara Chuang: tchuang@denverpost.com or visit dpo.st/tamara