A bad in-store experience will drive many shoppers online: Consumers are frustrated by how many items are locked up and how difficult it can be to find help.

Consumers focused on value in 2024: Retailers and brands like Aldi, e.l.f. Beauty, Temu, and Walmart benefited from consumers' growing cost consciousness.

Zalando agrees to pay €1.2 billion for German etailer About You: The deal aims to help the retailer garner a larger share of the fashion and lifestyle market.

A record number of people plan to shop over the Cyber Five: The NRF’s forecast dovetails with stronger-than-expected October sales, suggesting retailers have momentum heading into the holidays.

Shein, Temu, and Alibaba expand their US warehouse presence: The push dovetails with the US crackdown on the de minimis loophole.

Affiliate marketing reaches $10 billion milestone: Brands increase budgets as ecommerce and Gen Z engagement fuel growth.

Marketers project Q4 revenue gains: Sales to outpace ad spend growth, driven by focus on more efficient spending strategies.

Retailers faced no shortage of challenges in the first half of the year as elevated interest rates, the lingering effects of inflation, and a loosening labor market weighed on consumer spending. In this report, we’ll contextualize our coverage of retailers’ Q2 revenues across four key verticals: department stores, home, mass merchants, and off-price.

US ecommerce back-to-school and holiday growth trends are usually pretty similar, but this year, growth will diverge. US ecommerce back-to-school and holiday spending growth were within 1 percentage point of each other in both 2020 and 2021, and closer to 4 percentage points apart in 2022, during a holiday season impacted by inflation, supply chain issues, and geopolitical concerns. This year, we forecast a US back-to-school ecommerce growth rate of 1.5%, slower than our forecast 11.3% holiday retail ecommerce growth.

Though growth is slowing, digital grocery will continue to fuel overall ecommerce growth in the US. “Growth is no longer driven by new adopters, but heavy digital grocery users,” our analyst Blake Droesch said on a recent “Reimagining Retail” podcast episode. Here’s how retailers like Instacart, Amazon, and Walmart can capitalize on frequent buyers.

“Shopping apps and marketplaces that specialize in ultralow-cost goods from China are gaining a foothold among US consumers—with broader implications for the future of ecommerce,” our analyst Sky Canaves wrote in our Chinese Ecommerce in the US report. Canaves expanded on what’s driving this retail opportunity for companies like Shein, Temu, and TikTok in the US and how it will impact the US market on a recent “Reimagining Retail” podcast episode.

China’s example would suggest that retail media has enormous headroom for growth in the US. Companies like Amazon have been growing their ad revenues by leaps and bounds, and yet ecommerce channel ad spending will still only represent 14.6% of the US digital ad market this year. In China, the share will be 38.1%.

Retail ecommerce sales in Latin America were slower than expected during the first nine months of 2022: We break down why as well as which companies saw declines versus those that fared well.

The surge in consumer time and money spent online because of the pandemic led to a significant boom in the affiliate marketing ecosystem.