Apple closes three stores, adding to concerns about retail disruption: The temporary closures raise new questions about how the pandemic might affect holiday sales—but could click and collect benefit?

Despite being aware of shipping delays and low inventory, 74% of American shoppers say they plan to do some last-minute shopping this season. In response, some companies are adapting in ways that may benefit last-minute shoppers.

Retail sales for the 2021 US holiday season will soar as brick-and-mortar shopping returns with a vengeance and ecommerce maintains double-digit growth rates.

Ecommerce sales at Walmart, including Sam's Club, will reach $67.39 billion in 2021, per our forecast.

In-store shopping will remain a crucial part of the retail sales funnel in China, even as ecommerce players continue to rack up record gross merchandise value (GMV). Pre-pandemic, ecommerce was already disrupting brick-and-mortar retail, but over the past year, retailers began to innovate more offline, leveraging new and existing technology.

US click-and-collect sales more than doubled in 2020 and will sustain double-digit growth rates over the next four years. We forecast that click-and-collect sales will follow up last year’s 106.9% growth rate with a 15.2% increase this year, and that 150.4 million people in the US will make a purchase via click and collect at least once in 2021.

The number of click-and-collect buyers in Germany increased slightly during the pandemic, but not as much as in other Western European countries—and that lag will continue over the next few years. One bright spot, however, is that buyer penetration rates in Germany will steadily rise during that time.

US click-and-collect sales more than doubled in 2020, driven by the coronavirus pandemic, and will sustain double-digit growth rates over the next four years. Over 150 million people will make a purchase via click and collect at least once in 2021.

The 2020 holiday season’s unprecedented ecommerce surge helped total US retail spending remain positive, setting the tone for healthy outlook for 2021 holiday season growth.

Retail ecommerce sales in Western Europe rose by 26.3% in 2020, to €481.54 billion ($539.18 billion). The pandemic is fueling other shifts in the retail landscape, too, such as a greater focus on buying local.

Click and collect has been a growing trend for some time now as US consumers found they enjoyed the convenience and cost-savings of purchasing online and picking up their order on the way home from work or while running errands.

The retail industry is transforming at both physical stores and in digital. This report examines 10 trends that will most shape retail in the year ahead.

The 2020 US holiday season, set amid the backdrop of a pandemic-driven consumer economy, will see an unprecedented shift to ecommerce.

eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman and senior forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence Cindy Liu speak about innovations in ecommerce and how technology is creating a frictionless experience for online shoppers. They discuss the jump from fast to free shipping, what drone deliveries could potentially look like, and dive into the many facets of click and collect. They also explain the downsides of frictionless commerce and how businesses can overcome those hurdles.

The pandemic has hit lower-income households especially hard. But its effects are being felt across income brackets, and not always in predictable ways—for instance, upper-income consumers are making the biggest spending cuts.

Many consumers’ shopping behaviors have moved online in recent months, and that trend is likely to continue through the holiday shopping season.

Grocery ecommerce is having a moment. Already at an inflection point prior to the pandemic, the migration of essential goods to online has accelerated this trend by three or four years in the span of three or four months.

The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically altered the US retail and ecommerce landscape, with varying impacts in retail category growth.

Retail ecommerce in Western Europe was already growing at a healthy clip, both in aggregate and as a share of overall retail, but we now expect that the pandemic will cause overall spending to increase much faster than anticipated. Even as overall retail declines by 9.9% in the region, we estimate that ecommerce sales will jump by 16.9% this year—well up from our pre-pandemic forecast of 8.8%.

If the coronavirus pandemic has produced any winners in the retail sector, digital merchants are among that number.