/Deloitte survey, 74% of worldwide at-home AR users had used AR to communicate, and 52% had done so for media/entertainment. According to an October 2021 survey by Wool & Water, 47% of US shoppers had used an AR filter on social media in the past 30 days. “The mass-scale behavior already exists,” said Carolina Arguelles Navas, head of global AR product strategy and product marketing at Snap.

As buy now, pay later becomes a common consumer practice, Klarna has its sights set on expanding its services beyond online commerce. Hear from Klarna’s CMO about how its payment platform has turned into a growth partner for merchants and retailers.

Interviews & Insights with Retailers in Latin America, Part One

The For You page and trending videos were among the top places TikTok users worldwide discovered products in the food and beverage, luxury, and automotive categories, per an August 2021 Warc survey. The #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

The pandemic sparked greater global awareness of environmental issues and a renewed commitment to finding solutions. Climate change ranked as the top personal concern of Gen Z adults worldwide, ahead of both unemployment and disease prevention (amid a global pandemic), per Deloitte in February 2021.

Shein’s legal maneuvers demonstrate its global ambitions: The fast-fashion retailer is expanding its Singapore presence as it attempts to bypass stricter Chinese rules on offshore IPOs.

Tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance all have growing global footprints, and if they succeed in mastering the metaverse, there is a chance that a made-in-China metaverse will be adopted in other parts of the world, much like what is currently happening with TikTok.

Alibaba’s stranglehold on ecommerce in China is loosening: The company’s earnings disappointed amid weakening consumer demand, robust performances from rivals, and more scrutiny from Beijing.

In May 2021, we predicted total retail sales around the world for that year would increase by 6.0% to just over $25 trillion, a significant comeback from 2020’s lows.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, said in the company’s Q3 2021 earnings statement that in Q4, the company expected “to incur several billions of dollars of additional costs in our Consumer business as we manage through labor supply shortages, increased wage costs, global supply chain issues, and increased freight and shipping costs.”

As retail’s digital dominance grows, Google successfully captures retail ad dollars: Its investments in social commerce on YouTube and improvements to Google Shopping appear to have paid off.

Regulators worldwide are also closely watching AWS to ensure it complies with an increasingly complex patchwork of local laws governing international data transfers. Margin pressures: Even venture capitalists are starting to question the true costs of operating in the cloud.

In China, ecommerce sales will make up a substantial share of 2022's total retail sales at 46.3%, while the UK and South Korea will round out the top 3, with 36.3% and 32.2% ecommerce shares, respectively.

Why the metaverse will work: Emma Chiu, global director at Wunderman Thompson Intelligence, held a session discussing why the metaverse shows so much potential: 85% of consumers feel that for brands to be successful in the future, digital presences will be “essential.”. Chiu covered the concept of NOwnership—valuing experiences over material goods—and how it is more popular among Gen Zers.

Retail media advertising had a banner year in 2021—one that will be hard to top. Although growth is expected to taper this year, there are several reasons why retailers looking to build their own media networks should take notice.

By 2024, we expect US digital ad spend to be about $65 billion higher than what we expected before the pandemic. The biggest drivers behind these larger-than-expected increases are retail media networks and connected TV.

Among these are the sustainability reporting standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which has a worldwide remit. Other standards apply in specific industries, regions, or countries; one national framework is Germany’s Deutscher Nachhaltigkeitskodex (DNK).

The pandemic was disastrous for many retailers; we estimate that total retail sales worldwide plunged 2.8% in 2020. Though, while many physical stores were shuttered, digital retail sales soared by over 25% in a single year.

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