Digital Transformation in the Global Retail Sector

This research service is part of Frost & Sullivan's Integrated Commerce Research Programme. It provides an original perspective on how technology trends, MegaTrends and industry trends are driving the digital transformation of retail. The rise of eCommerce, online marketplaces, and subscription models have been complementing, while also disrupting and eroding traditional retail. Brick-and-mortar retailers are responding to the challenge and embracing technology to enhance their physical assets to create seamless, immersive, and multi-sensorial shopping experiences. Technology has become pervasive and is ‘transforming every company into an IT company’ as the saying has been for some time. Considering that a key driver for companies to engage in this digital transformation is the need to improve the customer experience, retailers as the archetypal customer-facing industry are particularly exposed to escalating expectations driven by digital technology, online and integrated omni-channel commerce. Retailers that fail to initiate a holistic and reasoned engagement with emerging technology that is reshaping the industry will fall behind. They will become unable to meet their customers’ expectations and fade into irrelevance or fully perish. This research service takes retailers and other readers on an exploratory journey through technology and technology-related changes in retail to provide orientation in this fast-evolving environment.