Suzin Wold, CMO, Rithum:
- Agentic commerce is taking over eCommerce – Agentic commerce will reshape retail from the inside out. If your products aren’t easy for AI agents to find and buy, you’ll lose share to competitors. Leading retailers will hand pricing, promotions, and storefronts to autonomous merchant systems, optimising sales and CX faster and pulling ahead.
- Ambient and embedded commerce – Platforms like TikTok Shop have already caused checkout to collapse into content. By 2026, if retailers don’t make shopping seamless within content, customers will lose interest and turn to competitors.
- Retail is becoming media and logistics – Retail is transforming into a hybrid of media and logistics. By 2026, physical stores will need to act as both social/online content creation hubs and fulfilment centres. Retailers that don’t adapt their store footprints will miss out on both customer engagement and delivery speed advantages.
- A generational wave of returns – as Gen Z and Millennials become ever more important consumer categories, the rising costs of returns is the next big challenge. Retailers need to get creative with generational awareness of the implications of returning products frequently.
- Commerce is no longer a channel – It’s a lattice of shoppable moments: marketplaces, social platforms, DTC sites, live shopping, affiliate networks, influencers, and more all competing for attention. Big sale events are not what they used to be, and journeys are nonlinear, agent-influenced, unpredictable, and deeply personal.
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