Retailers believe that early birds and primetime shoppers are the most important holiday audience. Procrastinators? Not so much.

Emerging retail tech straddles the line between utilitarian and useless. Improving the customer experience is usually the end goal but when it's implemented just for the sake of showing off, consumers don't always find it useful. According to a June 2018 JDA Software survey, consumers were receptive to the idea of retail tech.

When the first wave of social commerce arrived—mostly reproducing ecommerce catalogs on Facebook—critics predicted it would fail because users didn't want to shop where they socialized. More than half a decade later, most social media users still don't turn to social platforms to make direct buys. Now it's all about influence, social ads and a multi-channel path to purchase.