Top TV ads drive consumer engagement: Innovative creative and category-specific themes allow new brands to rival established giants in ad effectiveness.

The fight for grocery dollars is heating up. Retailers that offer shoppers the right assortment of products at the lowest prices are likely to win. In order to keep dollar and discount stores from stealing share, other retailers need to borrow their pricing and merchandising strategies to connect with cash-strapped consumers.

Grocery is set to become the largest US ecommerce category by 2026.

How do consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase new brands and products?

This year’s Groceryshop 2023 event in Las Vegas focused on marrying in-store and digital experiences, the growing retail media wave, and the benefits of personalizing messaging based on each consumer’s motivations, among many other takeaways. All of that comes as US food and beverage retail sales are expected to reach $1.378 trillion this year and surpass $1.578 trillion in 2026, according to our June forecast.

Walmart has the largest audience of any digital grocery platform. But our survey found that Amazon Fresh customers were more active and willing to try new products.

Shopping habits foretell the next phase of digital growth for grocery products.

The ecommerce boom in Canada means many product categories now sell a significant percentage online. This includes grocery, which we forecast for the first time this year.

US retail and ecommerce sales are getting back to their pre-pandemic growth trajectories, but consumer spending may be stunted amid ongoing economic uncertainty.

Calendar context: With the invention of Prime Day, Amazon created an industrywide retail holiday consumers can now count on in the summer each year. Last year, Amazon also launched its Prime Early Access Sale in October. “We now have three key tentpoles,” said our analyst Andrew Lipsman on “Behind the Numbers: Reimagining Retail,” referring to Prime Day, the Prime Early Access Sale, and Black Friday. But spring remains untapped. “A question I get is, ‘Is Amazon going to do more of these?’ And I think the answer is yes, eventually,” said Lipsman.

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands have attempted to break into D2C ecommerce in recent years, to varying degrees of success. How can they avoid unprofitable strategies and develop a viable D2C ecommerce channel?

Social media and TV are the top channels that consumer packaged goods (CPG) consumers use to find new products, but in-store still plays an important role in product discovery. Meanwhile, Amazon and Walmart are fighting to capture share of CPG product searches, though in-store consumers are more likely to turn to Google for help.

While retail sales growth is expected to slow this year, ecommerce sales will grow by double digits to reach $1.148 trillion, buoyed by online grocery, health and personal care, and online resale. Here are five charts on the categories, retailers, and channels driving ecommerce growth

Historically, apparel and accessories and computer and consumer electronics were the most dominate categories in ecommerce sales. They will remain significant sales drivers, but in the future, ecommerce will be more evenly spread among categories.

Which categories performed best in 2022—and which struggled? Inflation drove consumers to spend more on essentials like groceries, at the expense of discretionary categories.

What retailers need to know about the new wave of delivery apps and quick-commerce startups.

Our primary research reveals how grocery buyers are responding to inflation.

Inflation will drive sales growth, but consumers are also spending more of their overall grocery dollars online.

The digital shelf has grown more competitive for CPG brands amid the rise of grocery ecommerce and increasing retail media ad spend.

No economic pain for RaaS: Formic’s cheap rental robots are a lifeline for factories and warehouses suffering from labor shortages. RaaS could help companies compete globally and accelerate US manufacturing.