The retail industry is constantly evolving, and businesses and retailers need to stay on top of the latest trends. This year, thousands of retail professionals descended on the Javits Center in New York City for the National Retail Federation’s Big Show. Retail’s Big Show brings together change-makers and leaders from around the globe to showcase the latest innovations and illuminate trends.

Grocery lives in a world of retail unlike any other–there’s no getting away from the fact consumers need to buy the essentials, and those essentials can be found in their local supermarket. Grocery offers a wealth of opportunities to both improve the experience of shopping for everyday essentials, and to tempt shoppers to keep adding non-essentials to their baskets. Inflation is at a 40-year high.

As shoppers trend towards becoming true omnichannel consumers, they’re opening both their real and virtual wallets. Consumers who blur the line between IRL and online shopping spend 70% more often – and about 34% more than people who shop exclusively in-store, according to McKinsey.

Today’s shoppers insist on immediacy. They use their phones to get anything they want instantly. When it comes to shopping, a customer walks into a store and expects an item to be waiting for them on the shelf or immediately available through buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS). What does this mean for retailers that want to stay ahead of consumer trends? Let’s take a closer look at what an endless aisle is and what it means for the retail world.

It’s go time for retailers, and no one hustles harder than small businesses getting their brand out there during the holiday season. But those on the small-but-scaling side of retail don’t have to hustle on their own, especially when it comes to delivering an efficient, scalable customer experience through the high season and beyond.

Retail, at its core, is all about connections between brands and their customers. Increasingly, AI is becoming the interface for these brand connections, and is also a necessary relationship facilitator as customer expectations evolve. Prioritizing the customer experience is now essential to driving loyalty and growing revenue, as retailers today compete on customer experience just as much as price.

It is common knowledge in the eCommerce market that the cost of acquiring a customer exceeds the cost of retaining one. Customer retention is of the most important variables that formulate the user base of your store, and thus, it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Getting your customer retention rate to go up simply means making sure your business excels in the digital market. But the main question is how to improve customer retention?

According to the latest McKinsey report, the pandemic has redefined online shopping for the customer. Enter, omnichannel retail. With a drastic move to online stores, around 40% of customers have switched brands to those who are better equipped – not just in back-end logistics, but in terms of their customer experience as well.

The world is changing and so is the way we shop. A few years ago, consumers made it clear that it’s no longer just about which tee is the softest. They wanted to know if the tee was made in a sustainable way, without using forced or underpaid labor. Now, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and social uprisings of 2020, shoppers also want—and expect—brands to speak up for social justice.