2026 Top 10 Trends and Priorities for Retail
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View Our Research and Analyst ServicesTop Priorities for 2026
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01
Protect margins amid economic and consumer volatility
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02
Grow revenue across commerce channels
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03
Enhance customer loyalty and direct customer relationships
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04
Improve supply chain and fulfillment resilience
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05
Sense and anticipate changing consumer demand
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06
Improve workforce productivity and retention
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07
Improve inventory productivity and availability
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08
Increase speed to market and assortment agility
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09
Protect customer trust and operational resilience
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10
Reduce shrink and strengthen retail asset protection
Protect margins amid economic and consumer volatility
The Challenge
Manage increasing cost pressures across retail operations
Inflation, transportation costs, labor shortages, shrink, supply chain disruption, and rising fulfillment expenses continue to compress margins across the retail industry. Retailers are struggling to maintain profitability while balancing pricing pressures, promotional activity, customer expectations, and operational costs in highly competitive markets.
Why It Matters
Preserve profitability and operational stability in uncertain market conditions
Retailers that improve visibility into operational costs, inventory productivity, and customer demand can better manage volatility, reduce waste, and protect margins without sacrificing customer experience or fulfillment performance. With US retail returns projected at $849.9 billion in 2025, about 15.8% of sales, even modest gains in visibility and inventory productivity translate directly into protected margin ("2025 Retail Returns Landscape," NRF, 2025).
The Solution
Improve operational cost visibility
Prioritize integrated analytics, financial visibility, and operational reporting capabilities that provide real-time insights.
Modernize forecasting, pricing, and inventory planning
Focus on enabling AI-driven forecasting, pricing optimization, and inventory planning platforms that improve responsiveness to demand fluctuations and reduce inventory issues.
Automate operational workflows to improve efficiency
Invest in workflow automation, intelligent process orchestration, and connected operational platforms that reduce manual effort and improve consistency across retail operations.
Grow revenue across commerce channels
The Challenge
Compete across increasingly complex commerce channels
Retailers are navigating growth across e-commerce, marketplaces, social commerce, mobile commerce, AI marketplace, and physical retail environments. Many organizations struggle to maintain consistent operations, inventory visibility, and customer experiences across channels.
Why It Matters
Support revenue growth and customer acquisition
Retailers that improve omnichannel capabilities can better reach customers, improve fulfillment performance, and capture new revenue opportunities. With e-commerce reaching about 16.9% of US retail sales in the first quarter of 2026 and still growing faster than total retail, a strong omnichannel model is essential to capture demand ("Quarterly Retail e-Commerce Sales 1st Quarter 2026," U.S. Census Bureau, 2026).
The Solution
Modernize omnichannel commerce capabilities
CIOs should prioritize unified commerce and digital platform strategies that improve consistency across stores, e-commerce, marketplaces, and fulfillment operations.
Improve cross-channel operational visibility
Focus on integrating sales, inventory, fulfillment, and customer systems to improve enterprise coordination and customer experience consistency.
Strengthen digital scalability and performance
Invest in scalable cloud infrastructure, API-enabled architectures, and modern commerce platforms that support future digital growth and innovation.
Enhance customer loyalty and direct customer relationships
The Challenge
Meet growing expectations for personalization, convenience, and engagement
Consumers increasingly expect seamless omnichannel experiences, personalized promotions, faster fulfillment, and consistent engagement across physical and digital channels. Fragmented customer and operational systems often create inconsistent customer experiences.
Why It Matters
Improve retention, revenue growth, and competitive differentiation
Retailers that strengthen customer relationships and loyalty can improve customer lifetime value, increase retention, and reduce dependency on price-based competition. With 72% of consumers saying loyalty programs make them more likely to spend with a preferred brand and 56% spending more because of the program, deeper relationships are a proven lever against price-based competition ("Reshaping Loyalty Programs in an Era of Value Seeking," Deloitte, 2025).
The Solution
Build unified customer and loyalty ecosystems
Prioritize customer data platforms, CRM modernization, and loyalty platforms that enable a connected and consistent customer experience across channels.
Improve fulfillment and service transparency
Focus on integrated order management, inventory visibility, and fulfillment platforms that improve customer convenience and service reliability.
Expand personalization and customer analytics capabilities
Invest in AI-driven personalization, customer analytics, and engagement technologies that improve targeting, retention, and customer lifetime value.
Improve supply chain and fulfillment resilience
The Challenge
Navigate ongoing disruption across retail supply and fulfillment networks
Geopolitical instability, supplier concentration risks, transportation disruptions, and shifting global trade conditions continue to expose vulnerabilities across retail supply chains. Many retailers lack the visibility needed to proactively respond to sourcing, logistics, and fulfillment disruptions across the network.
Why It Matters
Reduce operational disruption and improve fulfillment continuity
Retailers that improve supply chain resilience can better improve fulfillment performance, and reduce financial exposure during periods of disruption. With 82% of companies reporting that new tariffs are disrupting their supply chains in 2025, each affecting 20% to 40% of supply chain activity, resilience and fulfillment continuity have become core operating requirements, not contingency planning ("Supply Chain Risk Pulse 2025," McKinsey, 2025).
The Solution
Improve end-to-end supply chain visibility
Deploy real-time monitoring and analytics to track supplier, inventory, logistics, and fulfillment performance.
Strengthen supplier and logistics collaboration
Use integrated procurement, supplier management, and logistics platforms to improve communication and risk management.
Support scenario planning and risk analysis
Leverage predictive analytics and digital modeling tools to identify vulnerabilities and simulate disruption scenarios across sourcing and fulfillment operations.
Sense and anticipate changing consumer demand
The Challenge
Sense and anticipate rapidly changing consumer preferences and buying behaviors
Consumer expectations are evolving faster than traditional retail planning cycles can support. Demand variability, trend acceleration driven by social and digital channels, and increasingly complex shopping behaviors make demand forecasting and planning increasingly difficult.
Why It Matters
Improve responsiveness and competitiveness in dynamic retail markets
Retailers that respond faster to changing customer preferences can improve revenue growth, reduce lost sales opportunities, and strengthen loyalty in highly competitive retail environments. With McKinsey finding that 30% of companies saw reduced customer demand amid 2025 trade and tariff volatility, the ability to sense and respond to demand shifts quickly has become a competitive necessity ("Supply Chain Risk Pulse 2025," McKinsey, 2025).
The Solution
Strengthen demand and sensing capabilities
Use AI-driven forecasting, customer analytics, and market intelligence platforms to improve visibility into changing customer demand and purchasing behavior.
Build a unified, real-time demand signal
Integrate POS, e-commerce, and external/market data into a single forecast that the rest of the business can plan against.
Detect and flag demand shifts earlier
Anomaly detection and trend alerts that surface emerging shifts before they hit sales.
Improve workforce productivity and retention
The Challenge
Address labor shortages, turnover, and workforce fatigue
Retailers continue to face challenges attracting and retaining frontline employees while balancing labor costs and customer service expectations. Many organizations struggle with inefficient workforce scheduling, limited employee engagement, and inconsistent productivity across locations.
Why It Matters
The workforce experience directly impacts the customer experience
Frontline employees play a critical role in customer satisfaction, operational execution, and brand perception. High turnover and disengagement increase operational costs and reduce service quality. Replacing a single frontline worker typically costs one-third to one-half of their annual salary once recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity are factored in, and the direct cost per hire alone now averages $5,475 for nonexecutive roles (SHRM, 2025).
The Solution
Modernize workforce management capabilities
Implement workforce scheduling, labor forecasting, time and attendance, and task management platforms that improve labor utilization and operational efficiency.
Improve frontline employee experience
Provide mobile tools, digital communications, training, and knowledge management capabilities that improve engagement and productivity.
Use AI to lift frontline productivity
Deploy task automation, micro-training, and smart scheduling so associates spend less time on manual work and more time serving customers.
Improve inventory productivity and availability
The Challenge
Balance inventory availability and profitability
Retailers continue to struggle with excess inventory, stock imbalances, markdown pressure, stockouts, and rising carrying costs. Volatile consumer demand, omnichannel fulfillment requirements, and increasingly complex product assortments make it difficult to place the right inventory in the right location at the right time. Many organizations lack the visibility and planning capabilities needed to optimize inventory, resulting in both lost sales and reduced profitability.
Why It Matters
Inventory is one of the largest drivers of retail profitability and working capital performance
Excess inventory increases carrying costs, ties up capital, and leads to markdowns that erode margins. Insufficient inventory results in stockouts, lost sales, fulfillment disruptions, and poor customer experiences. Retailers that improve inventory productivity can increase product availability, improve cash flow, reduce waste, and support profitable growth across channels. With inventory distortion, the cost of out-of-stocks and overstocks, still running about $1.73 trillion globally in 2025 (roughly 6.5% of global retail sales) despite $172 billion of improvement in the past year, inventory productivity is one of retail's single largest profit levers ("Retail Inventory Crisis Persists," IHL Group, 2025).
The Solution
Improve enterprise-wide inventory visibility
Prioritize integrated inventory management, analytics, and reporting capabilities that provide real-time visibility into inventory levels.
Strengthen inventory orchestration across channels
Enable connected inventory and order management capabilities that dynamically allocate inventory across stores, fulfillment centers, and commerce channels.
Apply AI to SKU- and location-level replenishment
Use machine-learning replenishment forecasting at the SKU and location level to right-size stock and cut out-of-stocks and overstocks across stores, fulfillment centers, and online.
Increase speed to market and assortment agility
The Challenge
Reduce delays in merchandising and product commercialization
Retailers face increasing pressure to launch products, promotions, and seasonal assortments faster to act on demand signals ahead of competitive market conditions. Disconnected merchandising, planning, and operational processes often slow execution cycles.
Why It Matters
Capture revenue opportunities before competitors do
Retailers that accelerate assortment planning, merchandising execution, and promotional responsiveness can better capitalize on consumer trends, increase market share, and improve sales performance. Fast-fashion disruptors show the stakes: Shein compresses trend-to-shelf to roughly 10 days versus 21-plus days for traditional players, and by 2025 Shein and Temu had become the primary online fashion marketplaces in the United States ("What Is Fast Fashion?" McKinsey, 2025).
The Solution
Modernize merchandising and planning platforms
CIOs should prioritize connected merchandising, assortment planning, and workflow orchestration capabilities that improve coordination.
Improve enterprise visibility across operational and customer data
Focus on integrating customer, inventory, sales, and operational systems to reduce delays and improve execution consistency.
Standardize workflows and governance processes
Implement workflow automation and governance capabilities that improve operational consistency and accelerate execution across merchandising and retail operations.
Protect customer trust and operational resilience
The Challenge
Navigate growing cyber, fraud, and sustainability risks across connected retail operations
Retailers face increasing exposure to cyberattacks, payment fraud, ransomware, digital scams, and sustainability-related scrutiny as retail operations become more digital, connected, and transparent. Expanding digital commerce, third-party ecosystems, connected operational technologies, and complex supply chains increase the challenge of protecting customer data, maintaining operational continuity, reducing waste, and proving responsible business practices.
Why It Matters
Security, trust, and operational resilience as a critical business requirement
Cybersecurity incidents, fraud events, and sustainability failures can disrupt operations, damage customer trust, create regulatory exposure, and result in significant financial and reputational impact. Retailers must protect customer relationships, maintain operational continuity, support secure digital growth, and demonstrate progress against sustainability expectations across stores, commerce channels, suppliers, and fulfillment operations. Even as the global average data breach cost eased to $4.44 million in 2025, retail was one of the few sectors where breach costs rose, underscoring that trust and resilience are now core business requirements ("Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025," IBM, 2025).
The Solution
Improve organizational resilience and incident response readiness
Develop stronger cybersecurity governance, incident response, and operational recovery capabilities that improve the organization's ability to respond and recover.
Strengthen identity, data, and payment security capabilities
Focus on modern identity management, access controls, payment security, and data protection capabilities that reduce exposure across customer, employee, and operational environments.
Secure the digital commerce surface
Protect e-commerce sites, APIs, and payment flows against fraud, bots, and account takeover while meeting PCI and privacy requirements.
Reduce shrink and strengthen retail asset protection
The Challenge
Combat rising shrink, theft, and fraud across retail operations
Retailers are experiencing increasing losses from shoplifting, organized retail crime, return fraud, self-checkout abuse, and inventory inaccuracies. The growth of omnichannel commerce, self-service retail models, and increasingly complex fulfillment operations has expanded operational vulnerabilities across stores and supply chain environments.
Why It Matters
Shrink is becoming a major threat to operational performance
Rising shrink directly impacts margins, inventory accuracy, product availability, employee safety, and customer experience. Retailers that fail to strengthen asset protection and operational visibility risk increasing financial losses, fulfillment disruptions, and reduced customer confidence. According to NRF’s 2025 Impact of Retail Theft & Violence study, shoplifting incidents increased by 18% and violent theft incidents by 17% year over year. The study also highlights the growing digitalization of organized retail crime: 70% of surveyed retailers reported an increase in phone scams, and 55% reported a rise in digital and e-commerce fraud perpetrated by organized retail crime groups over the past 12 months (NRF, 2025).
The Solution
Improve visibility across inventory and store operations
Prioritize connected inventory visibility, store analytics, and operational monitoring capabilities that improve insight into product movement, shrink patterns, and operational risks.
Strengthen fraud detection and loss prevention capabilities
Focus on integrated fraud detection, transaction monitoring, and retail security technologies.
Modernize store and operational security capabilities
Invest in connected security platforms, AI surveillance, operational intelligence, and real-time alerting capabilities that improve incident response, employee safety, and operational resilience.
