The overview: Consumer behavior will be shaped by continued economic uncertainty this year. Meanwhile, retailers will have to contend with a variety of competitive forces impacting how they run their businesses. Here are four storylines that we’ll be talking about this year.

Retail will experience an in-store renaissance: Most retailers can’t compete with Amazon’s increasingly fast shipping speeds or scale a membership program to the levels of Amazon Prime. Instead, they will shift focus to what Amazon can’t offer: multichannel convenience and making shopping fun. Some of the tactics they’ll use are:

• Use social and influencer content to highlight the in-store shopping experience.
• Leverage experiential retail to make shopping fun for Gen Z.
• Refocus their efforts on in-store click and collect.

China’s influence will shake up online shopping: Temu, TikTok Shop, and Shein have captured a critical mass of consumer attention. Using innovative shopping experiences that are app-based, entertaining, and highly deal-driven, these ecommerce players with Chinese roots are gaining ground on legacy retailers.

• To respond, established retailers will have to prove their value to consumers. One way they’ll do so is to differentiate by focusing on rich product assortments or specific categories (such as grocery), higher levels of customer service (including speedy delivery), product quality, and/or values such as sustainability.

TikTok Shop will give livestreaming commerce a glimmer of hope: While US consumers haven’t been sold on livestream shopping, TikTok has been aggressively pushing TikTok Shop videos into users’ For You pages, with shopping livestreams also thrown into the mix.

• By driving more consumers to engage with livestreaming commerce, more brands and sellers will shift their focus to cashing in on TikTok’s combination of massive audience, high engagement, and powerful recommendation algorithms that can make content go viral.

GenAI will move from experimentation to implementation for hyperpersonalization: The adoption of genAI has been faster than any other transformative technology. Our forecast expects nearly 78 million people in the US will have used genAI at least once a month in 2023. And according to research from the Future of Commerce, nine in 10 ecommerce professionals have used the technology for work-related tasks.

• GenAI will lead to updates in technology that will boost search across platforms. As search results get tweaked across channels, consumers are more likely to find what they are looking for, and what they didn’t know they needed, in-stock, and at their favorite locations.

Go further: Dive deeper into our predictions for this year in our report Retail Trends to Watch for 2024.