2024 has come and gone, with several retail trends surfacing. Amazon’s Prime Day reached record sales, skinny jeans went out of style, and department stores continued to close as a growing number of customers prefer to shop online. What will 2025 hold?

Our fingers are crossed for the return of bootcut denim, but digital strategy, not fashion, is our area of expertise, so we’ll stick to that. While personalization and AI-infused content and experiences will remain on the roadmap for many companies, 2025 will see a rise in traffic across digital marketplaces and even more interwoven omnichannel experiences than before. 

During a recent webinar hosted by InternetRetail, Nicole France, Contentful Chief Evangelist, and Marc Stracuzza, Director of Portfolio Strategy at commercetools, dug into these trends further while also exploring the industry challenges driving them. Ian Jindal, Editor-in-Chief at InternetRetailing guided the conversation and added to it, pulling from his insight gleaned throughout his time in the industry.

Below is a synopsis of key takeaways from that conversation. For a more thorough examination of these topics, check out the full webinar recording. 

What challenges are today’s retailers facing? 

Ian Jindal: We're seeing consumer demand under a lot of pressure in the U.K., U.S., Europe, and China as well. We’re experiencing long supply chain challenges like never before — whether it be from the rising cost of parts, near-shoring, on-shoring, or the development of more sustainable, transparent supply chains. We've got operational inflation, and we’re all keen for a pay raise, of course, but that makes business rates go up.

Nicole France: The things that have served us well in the past in terms of our go-to strategies for overcoming things and engaging our customers are in a very significant state of flux. If, as a business, you’re unable to flex, change, and try new, experimental things rapidly, you’ll struggle to overcome those challenges, and you’ll likely miss out on some huge opportunities that your competitors could pick up instead.

What can modern retailers do to remain flexible and overcome these challenges?

Nicole: This hits on the new way of working — which is all about iteration. This idea that you are constantly building from and extending what you've already done is the name of the game. And what's fascinating about that is that businesses are actually doing it with more than just how to bring on new technology implementation. You're effectively changing the way teams work as they do this. You see them start to do these experiments in these shorter sprints and see results. They make adjustments in an iterative way that ultimately drives business value in a bunch of different areas. We see this approach with a lot of our customers. They have a clear set of objectives, and some of them might be longer-term ambitious for where they want to get, but they understand that they're going to be able to do this in a kind of stepwise iterative way. And so they start with something that they can clearly define. It might be a pilot. It might be something more. 

Mark Stracuzza: Flexible technology is really the enabler of iteration. Take Contentful and commercetools as examples. We’re not going to dictate how you should go about building your business. But what we are going to do is enable you to do it, whichever way you want to, and fast. It’s agile in the true sense — you can just pick content, deploy changes daily, and get your ideas out there — A/B testing is also on the table. This agility isn’t limited to operations; it is related to how you adopt tools. You don’t have to wait for some big monolithic provider to create the capability you need. You can grab the best tool on the market for the job and integrate it. That’s the power of APIs (and why we love them so much).

Jumping to another trend, online marketplaces are getting a lot of attention from customers. Why is that?

Ian: If you look at Europe's top 1,000 companies, 35% are primary marketplaces or retailers who operate large marketplaces (i.e., sell multiple brands/vendors). This population of retailers is getting 77% of customer visits for ecommerce. What the consumer is telling us is that they want access to everything, and they want it delivered yesterday. What we see as a result is that retailers have to one-up each other to impress these customers.

Nicole: What's fascinating about marketplaces is they’re a proxy for where people go to find things, even information today — we know this to be true of social media as well. There’s also the dichotomy between having everything and having the best of everything. Customers want some curation from brands.

Mark: Right, customers want the biggest bang for their buck, not in terms of the physical thing they’re buying, but convenience.

Nicole: That said, there is also an appetite for more curated offerings. With a sea of options, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, and it can be difficult to find exactly what you are looking for. For consumers, there is the issue of standing out.

Speaking of social media, what are your thoughts on using this channel to sell your products or services?

Ian: We are seeing social channels become competent shopping channels — we're talking about, of the moment, Amazon-Prime levels of accessibility and deliverability under your mouse. For selling, Instagram is at the top, followed by Facebook, then TikTok. Why are these channels becoming popular for shopping? First is convenience, and then comes the social aspect, where you can connect with individuals or communities that have deep knowledge and experience with the product or services you’re considering. 

Nicole: ​​Where I think sales on social media win out over traditional ecommerce is within specific age brackets. The generations that are more hands-on with technology will have graduated to shopping within that interface. What’s interesting for companies is that they’re now required to deliver a brand experience in additional spaces, and it's hard to do that consistently.

Mark: Exactly, omnichannel commerce today isn't just two or three places anymore. It's not a website. It's not a mobile app. It's those things plus AR and VR — and it's going to keep getting more diverse. We need commonality and products that are really built to support this.

You need to fulfill orders on every channel simultaneously, but the last thing you wanna do is maintain 15 of the same product catalogs. So you need to take a different approach.

If 2024 was the year of personalization, then 2025 is the year of hyperpersonalization. But, are retailers ready for it? 

Nicole: Unfortunately, we get personalization wrong a lot today. There's a tremendous opportunity for improvement, but that doesn’t just mean unleashing generative AI to automatically personalize everything. I think we need to use it instead for the internal business processes that come before that personalization — like doing better at identifying audience segments and just seeing what is really meaningful. It's the simple stuff we need to get right first before we start trying to get too fancy.

How can Contentful and commercetools be leveraged to build personalized, omnichannel experiences?

Nicole: The architecture of the system itself is all API-first, which makes it much easier to integrate into all kinds of different contexts and uses, and it really makes that content portable across any kind of digital channel you can imagine. Whether that is websites or mobile apps, kiosks, digital signage, or social media, we have customers who are using Contentful to do all of the above in a way that's consistent throughout the customer lifecycle.

Mark: In this modern commerce ecosystem, you've got lots of different products that are meant to work together to create amazing solutions and impactful digital experiences that will propel the brand forward. And commercetools, we’re your back end. We help with your orders, your product inventory management — the back-end stuff. 

Do you have any real-world examples of this? 

Nicole: Sephora is a fantastic one. Personalization is a large focus of their digital experiences right now, but it’s something they’re well known for in their physical stores. When you go there and talk with an associate, they’re going to give you very tailored product recommendations and then guidance on how to use it. This is an experience Sephora is trying to translate online as well. Their tool, color IQ, is an example of how they’re doing it — and there is an interesting fluidity to it in that you can use your results to shop from different mediums at different times. Bang & Olufsen is another. When they were looking to build a new flagship store, they actually decided to make it digital.

Mark: For this, they needed to connect all their ecommerce tools, but they also had to integrate immersive experiences and offer accurate details for where people could find the products in store. It required a really interconnected system.

Nicole: We also can’t forget that how the experience looks matters as well. If you’re shopping at Bang & Olufsen, you want something state of the art and high design, so the company needs to consider this and build an experience that reflects it, and again, Contentful can help there. 

Wrapping up

Having outlined several of 2025’s retail trends — which span from social selling through hyperpersonalization — Ian, Nicole, and Mark ended the conversation by exploring one final customer example: Moonpig. To learn how the online greeting card retailer used Contentful to launch personalized card recommendations (or for details on any of the highlights covered), watch the full webinar recording. 

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