E-commerce is predicted to account for 75% of retail’s five-year growth, but a key challenge for retailers and brands is how to drive profitable online growth. The savviest are embracing new places of discovery, new engagement tools and ways to service evolving shopper preferences. This report uncovers how to generate sustainable online revenue through stronger engagement strategies. Topics covered include gamification, shoppable video, loyalty, social commerce, GenAI and Agentic AI.
This report comes in PPT.
The way shoppers discover products is evolving quickly. Retailers, brands and others are attempting to embed commerce closer to the first moments of inspiration when shoppers first get excited about products. The integration of GenAI is also shifting the search experience from keyword dependency in algorithms to more sophisticated models that understand users’ intent.
With more of the shopping experience shifting online, retailers and brands are embracing different engagement tools, like shoppable videos, gamification, virtual reality and conversational commerce, to enhance the online experience. These new approaches could help to usher in a more personalised and more intuitive online shopping experience.
Consumers are becoming more comfortable with technology facilitating some customer service interactions. The gap between what a human and a bot can provide as part of these interactions is likely to narrow further, as GenAI-enabled agents are able to solve more complex questions, with limited human input required in decision-making moments.
To date, most of the disruption caused by the arrival of GenAI in commerce has remained at the research phase of the path to purchase. As GenAI engines increasingly reduce friction, though, this disruption will move further down the path to purchase and open the door to AI shopping agents.
Retail is the sale of new and used goods to consumers from a business for personal or household consumption from retail outlets, kiosks, market stalls, vending, direct selling and e-commerce. Retail is the aggregation of Retail Offline and Retail E-Commerce. Excludes specialist retailers of motor vehicles, motorcycles, vehicle parts. Also excludes fuel sales, foodservice sales, rental transactions, and wholesale sales (e.g. Cash and Carry). Sales value excluding or including VAT/Sales Tax. Retail also excludes the informal retail sector. Informal retailing is retail trade which is not declared to the tax authorities. Informal retailing encompasses (a) sales generated by unregistered and unlicensed retailers, i.e. retailers operating illegally, and (b) any proportion of sales generated by a registered and licensed retailer that is not declared to the tax authorities. Unregistered and unlicensed retailers operate predominantly (although not exclusively) as street hawkers or operate open market stalls, as these channels are harder for the authorities to monitor than permanent outlets. Activities in the illegal market, which is usually understood to refer to trade in illegal, counterfeit or stolen merchandise, are included within our definition of informal retailing. Activities in the “grey market”, which is usually understood to refer to trade in legal merchandise that is sold through unauthorized channels – for example cigarettes bought legally in another country, legally imported, but sold at lower prices than in authorized channels – will be included as informal retailing if no tax is paid on sale by the retailer. However if the retailer pays tax – for example on cigarettes bought legally in another country but sold at a lower price than standard – the sale is included within formal retail.
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