Sucharita Kodali

The pandemic has been a pivotal moment for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) category. Before the pandemic, most CPG brands lacked direct-to-consumer (DTC) buy-ability on their website. However, the pandemic spurred numerous CPG brands like Beyond Meat, Bimbo, Del Monte, and PepsiCo/Frito Lay to launch DTC websites. The latest update to our Digital Go-To-Market Review series […]

Since April 2020, we have estimated how the retail economies of 30 major US metropolitan areas are recovering from COVID-19. By aggregating 11 metrics (across retail sales, local economic indicators, and virus spread), our model predicts that these metropolitan areas will face differing levels of COVID-19 disruption. For these metrics, we looked at US metropolitan-, […]

Our latest update to our Digital Go-To-Market Review series for brands looks at the consumer electronics sector. Electronics store sales peaked in 2007, and since then, an ever-growing proportion of consumer electronics sales has moved online.* In 2020, 64% of US online adults said that they made a consumer electronics purchase online on a computer, […]

Over the last 10 months, we have estimated how the retail economies of 30 major US metropolitan areas are recovering from COVID-19. By aggregating 11 metrics (across retail sales, local economic indicators, and virus spread), our model predicts that these metropolitan areas will face differing levels of COVID-19 disruption. For these metrics, we looked at […]

The retail holiday season is in the home stretch. We expect US online holiday sales this year will top $173 billion — or fully 24% more than last year.

Forrester’s Digital Go-To-Market Review evaluates brand manufacturers and how well they are positioned to thrive independently of online marketplaces and even traditional retailers. In our second edition of this study, we focused on the beauty goods sector, evaluating 34 brands on five elements for a total of 20 attributes. From this review, we rated seven […]

There were three interesting grocery developments in the last few days, all pandemic related and all reflective of the fact that digital transformation in grocery is still a work in progress and hardly a home run: Nestlé bought Freshly. This was probably the most predictable in that we’ve seen many big traditional companies buy startups […]

Since 2015, Amazon has hosted its annual summer sale, Prime Day, an exclusive deal event for its Prime members. In 2019, shoppers purchased more than 175 million items during the event, and its sales surpassed the prior year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined. For this year, due to COVID-19, Amazon’s highly anticipated event […]

In the wake of the pandemic's deluge of disruption, retailers, brand manufacturers, and ecosystem players such as mall operators are entirely rethinking their businesses, heralding much change ahead. Read what we predict for retail in 2021.

In a rapidly evolving retail environment, brand manufacturers that have traditionally sold through wholesale channels now need to think very differently about distribution. Some traditional wholesale partners are shrinking — meaning those (often long-standing) distribution partnerships simply can’t generate the sales and growth for brands that they did for decades. By contrast, online marketplaces are growing — and fast. Marketplaces promise access to vast swaths of new customers — but potentially also arm’s-length relationships with those customers and less control around placement, plus proximity to […]

One of the biggest transformations in retail that Forrester highlighted in its recent B2C buying research stream is the growth of brand manufacturers in commerce and the corresponding tension with marketplaces like Alibaba, Amazon, and others around the world. (“Brand manufacturers” are traditionally wholesale companies that distribute through intermediaries. They’re a complex ecosystem, and no […]

See how the retail economies of 30 major US metropolitan areas have fared in the wake of the pandemic, and learn what the near future may hold.

Well-executed loyalty programs strengthen customer relationships and drive business results. Our recent research reveals which program elements work particularly well, along with opportunities for improvement.

The single biggest transformation in the retail industry in the last decade has been the emergence of third-party marketplaces (often online bazaars subject to few restrictions) where sellers and buyers meet. Some sellers on online marketplaces, however, traffic in the business of outright fake products. Others may procure merchandise through legitimate channels but engage in […]

For years, retailers have been told they must engage with Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Now, they should begin leveling the playing field.

Retail changed substantially in the last decade, but not always in the ways predicted. VP and Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali looks back — and provides a few takeaways for retailers for the decade ahead.

Last weekend, Amazon informed its third-party sellers (which account for more than half of its unit sales) that they are no longer allowed to use FedEx’s Ground delivery service for Prime shipments. In its email announcement, Amazon noted that its reason is a decline in the delivery network’s performance and that it won’t lift the […]