Retailers are entering a new era of discovery. As AI-powered search reshapes how consumers find products, retailers are realizing they have a significant blind spot: anonymous customers. For years, the retail industry has optimized around known customers. Loyalty programs, CRM systems, personalized emails and app experiences are all built on the assumption that the most valuable shoppers are the ones who log in, return regularly and leave a trail of behavioral data behind them.

Holiday shopping trends revealed a sharp divide within the retail industry, and big-box stores are caught in the middle. Industry consumer spending data from the biggest pre-Christmas weekend of the year, Black Friday/Small Business Saturday, shows a clear bifurcation of shopping habits. Mid-market retailers report stagnant growth and missed targets, like Target’s 16 percent profit slip during Q3, but that’s really the result of consumer dollars headed in two directions: toward convenience shopping for commodities and experience-based shopping at local businesses.

Learn how brands can navigate the sea of AI Search and the change in consumer behaviours by optimising for LLMs, maintaining visibility, and building meaningfully different content strategies that drive growth. Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the pace of change in the digital marketing world has been overwhelming. The constant AI Search updates are sending ripples through the industry, while a tsunami of AI-generated content (AKA “AI Slop”) is sweeping the feeds of consumers in an already attention-deficient space.

These days, it feels like we all hear the same viral songs, and our feeds push the same outfits. We let algorithms decide what we see and tell us what we’re supposed to like. Spending time online doesn’t help us to find what we love any more because we’re losing touch with our own taste.

Whether it’s mindlessly scrolling or deferring to AI chatbots, we’ve started to outsource more and more of our critical thinking and creative decision-making. The cost is subtle but serious: we weaken our own sense of taste. For marketers, this is not just a philosophical problem, it’s a business one. When people don’t know who they are, they don’t know what they like or what they want to buy. 

Online marketplace shoppers are still more likely to being their purchase journey at a marketplace than any other channel, but the extent to which that’s the case appears to have lessened from last year as the journey becomes more fragmented, according to a report from ChannelEngine.

According to the survey of 4,500 online marketplace shoppers across the US, UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, 37% share tend to go first to online marketplaces when looking to purchase a product online, while 23% turn to search engines first, 11% to brand websites, and 9% to social media.

In an era where convenience is king, the swift, seamless transactions that consumers and businesses now expect have been hitting a major roadblock: fraud. The scale of this problem is staggering. By 2028, global losses to online payment fraud are projected to reach a jaw-dropping $362 billion. The United States is expected to see the impact of this primarily in card-not-present (CNP) transactions like e-commerce payments, new research suggests. These aren’t just line items on a profit and loss statement; they represent breached trust, lost customers and damaged reputations for businesses.

Against a backdrop of lingering concerns about consumer spending, Cyber 5 2025 delivered a resilient performance. Adobe Analytics reported $44.2 billion in online sales across the period, a 7.7% increase from last year, suggesting shoppers were still willing to spend when the value was clear, echoing what we saw during Prime Day. Cyber Monday led the charge with a record $14.25bn, and Black Friday followed with $11.8bn, both exceeding expectations.

Driving brand growth depends on getting more people to buy from your brand more often. In pursuit of this, there are often misconceptions and misinformation that focus wholly on customer retention/loyalty or customer acquisition. Across every brand/retailer and category Circana tracks, retention and acquisition are deeply connected. For brands to sustainably and consistently grow, they need to understand the driving forces behind consumer behavior, and more importantly, understand the complexities of modern consumers.