Being a successful retailer today is like being an acrobat: Juggling multiple projects to create the outstanding experiences customers want without overwhelming your organization. So, what are the priorities your business can move forward with still this year to take advantage of the holiday season? And what long-term strategies should you consider as 2025 approaches? Let’s break down the top quick wins and the long-run priorities for your commerce success.
The quick wins: Priorities for 2024
The holiday season is fast approaching, marking the most crucial time of year for countless brands and retailers. With seasonal opportunities like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas rush, it’s no surprise that retailers are focused on preparing for increased online traffic, crafting compelling promotions and fine-tuning loyalty programs to maximize every opportunity.
While implementing advanced technologies like augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR) may be out of reach for many in the short term, there are still high-impact strategies your business can adopt to make the most of the final quarter — while keeping an eye on future innovations.
As the boundaries between physical and digital shopping experiences blur, customers increasingly expect a seamless journey across all touchpoints – and that’s where “phygital” comes in. There are a ton of ways your business can go phygital, from enabling omnichannel fulfillment to streamlining the shopping experiences with “store mode” apps, which provide shoppers with specific functions or content for their in-store shopping journey.
This trend is particularly important as in-store shopping has seen a strong resurgence post-pandemic, so much so that Gen Z’s preference for in-store shopping experiences tops all other generations at 30.77%. For your business, that means providing ways to enable your shoppers to connect their digital journey with brick-and-mortar stores.
Key actions you can consider:
Implement features such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) and in-store returns for online purchases, giving customers greater flexibility. You can start with specific stores instead of rolling out across your entire retail presence.
More consumers expect to know if certain items found online are also available in-store, but only 35% of brands provide this capability. Ensure real-time inventory visibility so customers know what’s available both online and in-store.
Streamline payment options across both channels, ensuring consistent customer profiles for smoother checkouts and personalized recommendations.
With over half of the world’s population on social media, it’s no surprise that social commerce — selling directly through platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook — has exploded in popularity. This isn't just about social media marketing anymore but about creating shopping experiences directly within these platforms. A wide range of brands are finding new ways to create social-based experiences, such as “The boohoo Collective,” an initiative that integrates thousands of creators into the brand’s shopping experience.
The holiday season provides a great experimentation ground for brands to try out social-based commerce experiences, from shoppable posts to enabling direct purchasing within social platforms.
As mobile shopping is expected to take over eCommerce transactions, accounting for 53% of online sales during the 2024 holiday season, it’s clear that brands and retailers should focus on optimizing the speed and responsiveness of their mobile shopping experiences.
To achieve this, prioritize mobile-first design, ensuring intuitive navigation and a streamlined shopping experience on smaller screens.
Using PWAs for mobile-first design
Progressive web apps (PWAs) are ideal for mobile-first design because they combine the best of web and mobile app experiences, offering fast load times, offline functionality and responsive design that adapts seamlessly to any device.
Unlike traditional apps, PWAs don’t require downloads from app stores, reducing friction for users. Built with a mobile-first approach, they ensure smooth, optimized performance on smartphones, while still delivering a full-featured experience across larger screens, making them a flexible and cost-effective solution for brands aiming to improve their mobile presence.
Personalization is a multifaceted topic that can seem complex, but your business can harness AI-powered personalization strategies to maximize success this holiday season.
By utilizing data from browsing habits, past purchases and customer preferences, you can create tailored shopping experiences that drive higher conversion rates and build loyalty. For example, AI-driven recommendation engines can suggest products based on individual user behavior and preferences.
Looking ahead to 2025, machine learning algorithms can help predict future customer needs, enabling you to deliver personalized promotions and content that resonate more meaningfully with shoppers.
While shoppers using loyalty programs look for financial incentives such as discounts, especially as many continue to be concerned about economic uncertainty, a consumer survey by Deloitte revealed that “Consumers are increasingly looking for personalized, flexible, and digital-centric loyalty programs.”
In fact, the survey also states, “Engaging, enjoyable digital experiences are a requirement for younger consumers, with three-quarters of Gen Z and millennial consumers stating a high-quality digital experience is essential for loyalty programs.” Enhancing loyalty programs around major shopping events will help your brand boost engagement and long-term retention.
Key actions you can consider:
Design loyalty programs that reward purchases, social interactions and referrals.
Ensure loyalty points, rewards and promotions are visible and easily redeemable during the checkout process.
Tailor loyalty programs to individuals, using data to provide personalized offers based on preferences and behavior.
Gamify your loyalty program to create brand stickiness with your shoppers.
Long-term initiatives: Priorities for 2025
While the short-term priorities focus on optimizing current operations, the long-term vision is about embracing innovation and laying the groundwork for future growth.
As mentioned earlier, shoppers continue to flock to brick-and-mortar stores, making it more relevant than ever to blend online and offline experiences as part of seamless omnichannel commerce experiences. However, as technology continues to evolve, the next step is to go beyond omnichannel to unified commerce, where all customer touchpoints — online, mobile and physical — are integrated into a single platform.
Key actions you can consider:
Move from fragmented systems to a single, unified platform for seamless operations across all channels.
Ensure real-time synchronization of product data, inventory and customer profiles.
Offer flexible fulfillment options, including curbside pickup, same-day delivery or ship-from-store, based on real-time data.
In addition to ensuring your mobile shopping experiences hit the mark this year, it’s crucial to bring advanced performance and scalability to the fold as 2025 arrives. Not only do consumers expect top-notch speed and performance but these factors also affect Google rankings and SEO (search engine optimization).
A high-performing digital shopping experience leverages a cloud-native SaaS, a modern approach that taps into cloud computing infrastructure to automatically scale online capacity to handle surges in traffic. Those spikes may come from spontaneous demand triggered by a social media post that goes viral or seasonal events like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are best handled by cloud computing providers like Google Cloud, or Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Cloud-native infrastructure meets composable commerce
To stay agile and scalable, retailers will increasingly turn to composable commerce, an approach that allows businesses to scale efficiently and respond quickly to market changes.This year, brands and retailers had the opportunity to try out different use cases powered by generative AI. From leveraging LLMs (large language models) for product search and chatbots to leveraging data for instant insights, the technology is already changing how consumers shop and connect with brands. For example, a survey by search vendor Constructor revealed that 61% of shoppers who are unsure of what to buy would “definitely” or “probably” be willing to let an AI shopping assistant help them.
In 2025, it’s time to pursue the GenAI use cases that make sense for your business. An example is hyper-personalization, where AI and predictive analytics enable brands to tailor every aspect of the customer journey — from product recommendations to content and promotions — based on real-time data and preferences.
As digital platforms have become indispensable for retail transactions, retailers find themselves at the intersection of innovation and consumer convenience. However, this digital prowess brings with it a crucial responsibility: Safeguarding customer data and privacy. Adopting powerful measures to protect sensitive information fosters not only consumer trust but also ensures compliance with evolving data protection regulations.
For retailers to create the best line of defense, having robust security and monitoring in place is crucial — and that will become one of the most sought-after requirements for digital services, including commerce. This entails enhancing secure payment processing capabilities, implementing data encryption, enforcing stringent data governance, applying access controls and strong authentication, as well as adhering to global compliance standards. The role commerce technology plays in supporting the security of customer data is crucial and can be done in several ways:
Enhancing payment processing: Commerce technology often integrates secure payment gateways to manage financial transactions. These gateways rely on encryption and tokenization to protect customer payment data, ensuring sensitive information remains confidential throughout the transaction process.
Advanced data encryption: These technologies use state-of-the-art encryption techniques to safeguard data both at rest and in transit. Customer data is encrypted when stored on servers and during transmission, making unauthorized access or interception very difficult.
Rigorous access controls: Commerce technology enforces stringent access controls, limiting access to sensitive customer data to authorized personnel only. This significantly reduces the risk of data breaches from insider threats or unauthorized access.
Real-time monitoring and alerts: Implementing monitoring and alerting systems is critical for swift detection and response to security incidents. With anomaly detection and threat intelligence, eCommerce systems can quickly identify and mitigate potential threats, improving overall system resilience.
Regulatory compliance: Best-in-class commerce technology is built to comply with data protection regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS, ensuring that customer data is processed and handled in line with legal requirements.
By incorporating these features and adhering to best practices, commerce technology becomes a pivotal ally in creating a secure environment for customer data, minimizing risks and preventing fraudulent activities.
Balance quick wins and long-term priorities with composable commerce
While comprehensive, this list isn’t limited to the priorities stated here. Your business is unique, and so are your goals and initiatives.
Retail eCommerce strategies are broad and diverse, with many options for your business to stand out in a crowded marketplace. From experimenting with AR/VR to bringing in voice commerce and conversational AI, you can implement short-term optimizations and long-term innovations according to your company’s timelines and priorities.
Bringing these pragmatic strategies to life is much easier and simpler with a composable commerce platform, which provides brands and retailers with the flexibility, scalability and agility they need to add new channels, boost performance, speed and more.
For retailers that require a more streamlined implementation of composable commerce this year, commercetools Foundry for B2C Retail helps businesses unlock the benefits of composable faster with a pre-composed solution and expert best practices. This blueprint is a great place to start a commerce project while leveraging top-notch strategies that empower retailers to differentiate and grow.
If composable commerce is on your radar to turbocharge your growth plans this year and the next, explore commercetools Foundry for B2C Retail.