retail

2019 marks my third year attending the NRF Big Show. I’ve been to enough shows to have an informed opinion but few enough that it still feels new — Goldilocks-approved! A few quick impressions: China and Brazil are making headlines. NRF says 99 countries were represented in its 37,000 attendees this year. While it’s been a […]

At this year’s NRF Big Show, I focused my time on discovering and searching out new tech and experiences that will be incorporated in the stores of tomorrow. During my time, here are three quick observations that I made: Computer vision AI is taking the first steps to transforming brick and mortar. Computer vision AI […]

Omnichannel investments, including in-store pickup and endless aisle, continue to be top strategic investment for digital business professionals at retail organizations. Forrester predicts that digital touchpoints will influence 55% of total European retail sales by 2022, so a retailer’s digital presence continues to play a significant role in influencing consumer purchase decisions, both online and […]

Retailers are slowly moving beyond omnichannel fulfillment capabilities in stores to invest in digital store technologies that empower store associates, improve customers’ engagement, and enhance store operations. There is no single formula for great execution on digital store technologies, and the varied performance of the retailers assessed shows that many are still figuring out the […]

Luxury brands have gone from relative inertia over digital strategies to a flurry of activity, including technology upgrades, partnerships, and even acquisitions. Back in the summer of 2017, we warned that luxury brands were out of time when it came to improving their digital customer experiences and internal operations. Digitally mature and savvy luxury consumers […]

Every company faces a central dilemma: how to resolve the standardization and differentiation of its business apps to win, serve, and retain customers. That’s why we are still getting a lot of questions about this report. We have been wondering how much the move to cloud, mobile, and embedded machine learning or artificial intelligence will […]

I spent this week in Las Vegas at CES to check out the latest and greatest technology wonders, ranging from 3D printing, AI, and cryptocurrency to drones, autonomous vehicles, dancing robots, and wearables. A lot of what I saw has broad CX implications for accessibility, healthcare, and more. My focus was on who will use […]

I was in Shanghai last weekend to witness the largest 11/11 in history. Alibaba breaks another record, with 2018 GMV reaching RMB213.5 billion (US$30.8 billion), 27% higher than last year’s RMB168.3 billion ($25.3 billion). I’m excited to share some of the event highlights here: Stay tuned for the post-event report on Singles’ Day 2018.

Earlier last week, UK high-street apparel retailer New Look announced plans to close 85 stores, up from the 60 it announced in March. These closures are happening under the auspices of a restructuring deal (a CVA, first introduced as a “company voluntary arrangement” in the Companies Act 1980). Simultaneously, it unveiled a return to profitability […]

Singles’ Day, the world’s largest online shopping festival, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. There’s no doubt that we will see another record-smashing year, although gross merchandise volume (GMV) will no longer be the highlight. Singles’ Day has always been Alibaba’s testbed for new business models and technologies, and this year is no exception. AI and […]

Digital is the rocket fuel for retail’s growth. But that growth requires retailers and brands to keep up — and step up — how quickly they evolve in terms of people, processes, products, and more. On top of all that, in 2019 we’ll see factors such as global economies, trade barriers, rising wages, and marketplaces pack a […]

Marc Andreessen once said, “Raising venture capital is the easiest thing a startup founder is ever going to do.” That’s a bit of hyperbole from Marc, but there’s a lot of truth to it if one’s timing is right. Technology startup markets can go through periods of irrational exuberance in which money seems to grow on trees. Those […]

My colleague Alex Causey and I have now finished “The Forrester Retail Wave™: European Mobile Apps, Q4 2018,” the second Retail Wave we’ve done. This year, we evaluated the functionality and usability of six European retailers’ mobile apps. For retailers with a pan-European presence, we selected one European market in which to evaluate the retailer’s app […]

Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) research shows that, year on year, retail performance is still not reaching levels of “excellence.” Instead, retailer performance clusters around the “OK” level. There are of course bright sparks, with retailers such as John Lewis outperforming peers, but even those standouts are only reaching “good.” So what is holding […]

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. Black Friday holiday sales events are a fixture of the European holiday shopping season (even without a European equivalent of the Thanksgiving holiday!). Initially finding its way to the UK, the sales day has extended across Europe to become a significant sales event from […]

Autonomous payments is the future state of payments — and banks, merchants, and payment vendors need to prepare now. Venture funding in this arena already exceeds $28 billion. Coupled with intensifying economic and political forces, consumers globally will see this new but nonlinear evolution of payments emerge, where payments will melt into the wider commerce experience […]

Over $1 trillion (no typo) — that’s how big 2017 holiday topline sales were in the US and Europe combined. As for online sales specifically last year, Forrester projected $129 billion in the US and €54 billion in Europe. As a retailer with substantial revenue at stake, you’ve made your merchandise buys, allocated your marketing dollars, and feverishly analyzed […]

Stripe, one of the leading payment providers for online and platform businesses, today announced “Stripe Terminal” to tackle the merchant challenges around in-person payments. Stripe’s solution combines several of the technology components that go into in-person payments and works to abstract the complexity away for merchants and developers. In-person payments are operationally challenging for merchants. […]

Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) results continue to show that companies are struggling to create and sustain a human connection with their customers. This is not a question of delighting customers as an endgame or some fluffy sense of emotional attachment; this is a crass and clear story of financial risk. Taking a step […]