Sucharita Kodali

Customers expect it — but it places a burden on retailers. Recent innovations may allow retailers, carriers, and customers all to benefit.

As eCommerce continues to grow, so do online returns. Digitally native startups are shifting shopper expectations with their customer-centric return processes, leading traditional retailers to rethink how they handle returns.

Some may see the surprise purchase of the storied department store as a sign of things to come. In fact, it may be more of a cautionary tale for retailers.

15 billion — that’s how many eCommerce orders were delivered last year to customers in the US. Not only are the costs of these shipments increasing, but many of those deliveries are inefficient and generate negative externalities for communities (think clogged roads, for starters). For my new research, “The US Last-Mile Landscape Today,” we interviewed […]

Has Amazon destroyed retail or does it help SMBs? We review the facts surrounding the new antitrust investigation.

Is ultrafast shipping really what retail customers want? Although Amazon's recent announcement indicates yes, the story isn't so simple.

This year’s State of Retailing Online report focuses on omnichannel fulfillment, personalization, and digital marketing.

With online sales representing over 20% of sales in most physical good categories and the ability to buy unauthorized goods from anywhere in the world, the gray market is more present than ever. However, brands are not monitoring their online goods, allowing for any good to be available for sale on the internet, including marketplaces. […]

Last week, IRI hosted its annual Growth Summit in Denver (where some hapless attendees were snowed in by an unfortunate blizzard on the second day). For anyone not familiar with IRI, it is one of the world’s largest analytics firms. Among a slew of other assets, it has proprietary data from checkout registers, which gives […]

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 […]