Top takeaways from the 2022 Retail Report

When you expect the unexpected, you can set your business up to weather turbulent times. If the past few years of the global pandemic have done anything, they’ve proven that adage true. When it became clear that the retail, hospitality, and food and beverage (F&B) sectors were about to take a big hit due to restrictions, businesses worldwide took the opportunity to adapt to create flexible, tech-driven experiences that blurred the lines between sales channels.

The result? In our2022 Retail Report together with KPMG, we've found that companies who unified their commerce and payments across channels have come out of the pandemic stronger than ever. By breaking down internal and technological barriers with cross-channel payments, companies are facilitating increasingly non-linear customer journeys – and setting a new standard for the post-pandemic customer experience along the way.

We've taken a closer look at the most pressing industry trends and how they will influence current and future digital strategies. Here are our five top takeaways.

Whether or not to invest in digitization is no longer a question. The need to make products available with limited access to brick-and-mortar stores has seen many companies prioritize digitizing operations across the business, with the goal of connecting systems and increasing agility. Payments are increasingly included in this strategy, from linking frontend sales channels to integrating payments with backend inventory management and supply chains.

Companies who have embraced the opportunity of digital transformation during the pandemic have come out on top. Our research shows that those who connected theirpayment systems to other parts of their business have seen an increase in growth of 9% over those who haven't, and are expecting substantial additional growth in the next year.

The opportunity and necessity of breaking down silos and integrating operations into the larger customer experience are felt across the board. Over 90% of businesses in the retail, hospitality, and food and beverage (F&B) sectors plan to make further investments in this area in 2022.

As the lines between on- and offline life continue to blur, the advantages of delivering a unified shopping experience have become evident to consumers and merchants alike. Customers have taken to flexible, non-linear journeys like an octopus to water, with all eight legs reaching for a different touchpoint. The convenience of click-and-collect or curbside pickups cater to goal-oriented customers, while brick-and-mortar experiences are still available to those that want a more immersive experience.

We've found that 61% of consumers think retailers should continue to deliver the same cross-channel flexibility after the pandemic. And if they don't, an even larger percentage of shoppers will drop off and not return when they've had a bad shopping experience, regardless of the platform.

To deliver a consistent and streamlined customer journey across different platforms, you need to connect the dots. That's whereunified commercecomes in. 42% of businesses stated that a benefit of unified commerce has increased customer loyalty.

Delivering a cohesive cross-channel experience to your customers is only the beginning. Rather than solely focus on enabling shoppers to buy across channels, you can maximize customer loyalty and make data-driven decisions if you feed payments from all your channels into the same system. You can gain insights into customer segments and behavior in almost real time by keeping an eye on payment data. With these insights, you can recognize returning customers, remember product and payment preferences, streamline checkout, make personalized offers, and provide rewards for repeat business.

An area that holds great promise is creating payment-linked loyalty programs that automatically recognize and reward return customers with personalized rewards. With the correct technological setup, you can allow your customers to reap the benefits of loyalty programs automatically rather than work with outdated loyalty cards or other schemes.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. After a prolonged period of limited access to physical stores, customers have a renewed appreciation for shopping offline. 59% of customers say they enjoy touching, feeling, and trying products before they buy, and 61% of customers would be more loyal to your brand if they could return online orders in-store.

There's a catch, though. Rather than visiting just any old store, the same amount of consumers thinks stores need to be exciting places to visit. Places that offer more than goods and services. Stores that use technology to improve and streamline the shopping experience.

You might wonder how? Shoppers would love it if in-store assistants used technology to assemble items from their online wishlist to fit or be able to check additional stock for home delivery quickly.

It shows that the customer experience flows across channels seamlessly, and cross-channel experiences are vital to ensuring shoppers' loyalty.

Thanks to the wealth of payment data, you can spot and respond to trends and changes as they happen. By gaining insights into things like customer preferences, purchase trends, wait times and peak times, you can adapt your marketing campaigns, inform inventory management, or adjust staff rosters to make the most of emerging opportunities.

If you're planning to use payment data to make informed decisions, there are some things to consider. Both regulations and consumers demand you use data responsibly by conforming to local and global data protection laws and asking customers for express permission about their data usage.

But the benefits will be worth your while. 47% of customers prefer retailers who remember their preferences and create a more personalized experience. And when a customer likes buying from you, it's likely to lead to return purchases and customer retention.

What started as a fallback during the pandemic, has proven to be the key to growth. By harnessing the power of technology and digital transformation, companies in the retail, hospitality, and F&B sectors worldwide have laid the groundwork for a new era of commerce. An era where customer purchase journeys flow seamlessly across platforms.

If you want to read more about our most significant insights on digital transformation, dig deeper into consumer expectations, and discover how unified commerce can help your business grow, download the Adyen Retail Report 2022 today: