Michaels and Shutterstock are navigating growth through a blend of creative initiatives and hard metrics. Michaels is focused on enhancing its customer experience and its new online marketplace. Shutterstock is leaning into SEO, automated dashboards, social listening, and collaboration.

Embracing mobile gives consumers access to a branded experience both online and in-store, while in-store technologies bring the digital world into the physical. To cater to shoppers no matter where or how they shop, brands should also make sure they’re balancing in-store and online rewards as well as D2C and wholesale commerce.

Click and collect has matured as an ecommerce channel, but growth will slow as pandemic concerns alleviate.

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

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 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.

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%.

As lockdowns slowly lift in the US, retailers face a changed shopping landscape. With lingering fears over renewed outbreaks, many consumers are wary of returning to stores.

The coronavirus pandemic has been disastrous for the vast majority of Europe’s retailers. Digital retail has benefitted, though. In Germany, we expect retail ecommerce sales to rise 16.2% this year, and total $92.33 billion.

Grocery companies—and more specifically their systems and services—have really been put to the test amid the pandemic. Many grocers are having trouble keeping items on the shelves. And even the most prepared are encountering issues with supply chain logistics.

With the impact of the coronavirus still ricocheting throughout the economy, it can be difficult to envision retail one day returning to normal. And yet, somehow it will—and much of it will look virtually indistinguishable from the pre-crisis reality. But certain changes in consumer behavior will be lasting.

The 2019 holiday season capped a tough year for physical retailers in the UK, with brick-and-mortar sales down for the second year running. However, strong gains in retail ecommerce sales meant that overall, retail sales saw growth during the season.

Last year, the number of locations offering “buy online, pick up in-store” (BOPUS) nearly doubled among leading US grocery retailers. Walmart (and various third-party partners), Target/Shipt, Kroger/Instacart, Ahold and Albertsons brought their collective number of click-and-collect locations from 2,451 in January 2018 to 5,800 in December 2018, per data from CommonSense Robotics.

Buy online, pick up in-store is seen as the solution for consumers who don’t want to wait for their package, but according to an OrderDynamics survey, 30.3% of retailers in select countries can confirm an order for pickup—more or less in the same timeframe as standard shipping—in two or more days.