Sucharita Kodali

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. Online holiday shopping in the US is set to grow to $151 billion this year, up 14% from $133 billion in 2017. Total holiday sales will grow at a more conservative 1.7%. All told, we see approximately one-fifth of all US holiday shopping this […]

The barrier has never been lower for retail shoppers to compare offerings and try new companies. Superior customer experience (CX) helps foster loyalty, and at the end of the day, CX leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards. However, we found that most retailers continue to struggle at delivering great experiences to their customers. Forrester […]

In digital transformation, there’s a fine line between fearlessness and foolishness. Bad decisions can have all the trappings of a bold new strategy: a costly acquisition suddenly pivoting to an unexpected new product offering that’s an ambitious new vision for the future. Similarly, when consumer media hypes a new business model that will “disrupt” an […]

Last week’s NRF Big Show at the Javits Center in New York City is the industry’s largest confab and its timing (as most retail fiscal years close) makes it a good prognosticator of which retail technologies companies will be investing in (or at least investigating) in the coming year.  After talking to retailers, exhibitors and […]

Target announced yesterday that it acquired a startup in the grocery delivery space called Shipt for $550MM.  If you’re familiar with Instacart, you get the gist of Shipt.  If not, think Uber for groceries—consumers place an order through Shipt and a marketplace of drivers shops for your items and delivers it to you on your schedule.   […]

Across industries, improvement in CX leads to growth in total revenue. Facing stiff competition on- and off-line, retailers need to invest in superior CX to differentiate themselves and foster the loyalty of empowered customers. However, consumers tell us that the opposite is happening. In 2017, we saw both traditional and digital-only retailers’ CX quality slip. […]

In a world of hyper-adoption – and hyper-abandonment – successful retailing in 2018 comes down to obsessing about your customer’s experience. It’s a tall order: Digital and physical touchpoints now must work together flawlessly – yet also do what each touchpoint does best on its own. And organizations must remove silo shackles to unify disparate […]

Because it has over 4,000 physical retail stores but more than 60% of video game sales are projected to move online by 2020, GameStop is in the midst of major disruption.  The steps it has taken to maintain growth and margin are nontraditional and  compelling.  In fact, we featured many of these tactics in last […]

In a recent Forrester-Shop.org study, we found that 70% of online retailers are investing in “content” in the coming year. What sort of content you may ask. Usually when they say “content” retailers mean videos, blog posts and magazine-like content that is best for consumers at the top of the shopping funnel. This type of […]

In late March, Amazon cracked up the Twittosphere with an  announcement that it would release a Dash button (not to be confused with the Amazon Dash device which is a wand for your kitchen).  It is a button that you put in your home (like your laundry room) and program to order a single packaged […]

The hottest topic in eCommerce these days seems to be “buy buttons.” The energy though appears premature. Pinterest announced its buyable pins with a press conference and sentimental Hallmark-like videos though the buyable pins are actually hard to find. Facebook, the king of all social networks, announced a buy button more than a year ago […]

As mobile becomes a critical component of your digital strategy and overall business, eBusiness professionals should have an answer when their executive teams ask, “Who does mobile commerce well?” Forrester has answered that question for you in our new report published today.  Using a proprietary framework, we analyzed top retailers’ mobile experiences (sites and apps) […]

2015 is upon us: in Forrester’s just-released “Predictions 2015: US B2C And B2B eCommerce Players Will Struggle To Keep Up With Customers” report, we predict a number of key issues will challenge B2C eBusiness & Channel Strategy professionals in the coming year, while a number of new and exciting—but not pressing—topics will circulate. B2C eBusiness […]

Forrester predicts that US online retail sales will reach $89 billion during the 2014 holiday shopping season. Shoppers turn to the Web during the time-pressed period between November and December to avoid crowds, lines, and, in many cases, higher prices. This holiday season, eCommerce will experience a boom in the number of online buyers, as […]

Cross-channel sales — also known as web-influenced sales or transactions that touch a digital medium, but are not completed on the Internet — are now more than four times larger than online sales alone and will reach $1.8 trillion by 2018. This is according to Forrester's just released five-year US cross-channel retail sales forecast. Offline […]

If I had a dime for every time I heard the question “Isn’t eCommerce taking over retail?”,  it wouldn’t make me wealthy, but I’d certainly have a few hundred dollars more than I do now. Nonetheless, it’s a question that is unfortunately misguided and has permeated our zeitgeist. The truth is that yes, eCommerce is […]

One of the biggest recent stories in the eCommerce media has been the talk of splitting eBay and PayPal, which was driven by activist investor Carl Icahn.  eBay maintains Mr. Icahn’s idea is not new, and that eBay’s board has rejected the notion based on its own previous evaluations of the best strategic paths for […]

Forrester’s "US Online Holiday Retail Forecast, 2013" launches today. In it, we predict that for the third consecutive year, online holiday sales (November and December) are expected to grow at a double-digit pace and pull in over $78 billion. This represents about one-third of the overall retail sales volume for the year. This optimism is largely […]

One of the most common questions I get is “Who does personalization really well?” And at its heart, great personalization is about effectively deciding which products (or offers) from a deep product catalog to showcase when and to whom. Ever since Gilt Groupe founder Alexis Maybank spoke at one of Forrester’s eBusiness Forums and talked […]