Store Matters – How Retail Still Runs Through Local Stores Even in Digital Age

Store Matters – How Retail Still Runs Through Local Stores Even in Digital Age

North American Retail started out like gangbusters in 2020, with the first two months showing a 6.4% gain over the same period a year before. But then COVID happened, and the entire landscape changed seemingly overnight. At the time of this writing, retail sales are up 2.2% through November, but the contributors to that growth look very different from the beginning of the year. What does that mean for 2021?

In this collaborative study with RIS News you will gain insight into what some of the more successful retailers have been doing to pivot their businesses during trying times. Have the new customer journeys been a rousing success, from the standpoint of customer satisfaction and also profitability? How are retailers dealing with heretofore unrealized customer demands? What technologies are Leaders looking to adopt? What types of retails struggled to survive, never mind thrive? How is BOPIS driving store investment? How many are not only growing stores but growing the sales in those stores vs those who are simply accepting a lower sales per store? What about ecommerce growth, how much of this is expected to be desktop vs mobile? And finally, which new initiatives such as Edge Computing, SD-WAN, Microservices Architecture, IoT, Store-level 5G, and Dark Stores / Dark Kitchens are seeing growth in investment vs. declines?