IDC Retail Insights: Europe, Middle East and Africa Retail Platforms and Technologies

Retail is going through a serious transformation. As customer expectations lean toward channel-agnostic experiences, retailers are fast-forwarding toward truly omni-channel models enabled by greater online-offline intergration. Conversely, CPG and brands companies are expanding their reach to end consumers through direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategies. IDC Retail Insights: Europe, Middle East and Africa Retail Platforms and Technologies looks at how these dynamics drive omni-channel commerce innovation, within the broader context of retail commerce platform implementation. In particular, it analyzes topics such as the merging of ecommerce and store technologies (such as headless commerce and edge computing), the impact of new business use cases (e.g., live streaming product discovery and purchase, cashierless checkout), the integration with the ecosystem of online marketplaces, and adoption of new commerce operational models. The service helps retail business and digital and technology executives to make better strategic decisions, define and execute retail commerce strategies and road maps at speed, deliver new business models, and identify the required technology changes.

This advisory service develops unique analysis and comprehensive data through IDC Retail Insights' proprietary research projects, along with ongoing communications with industry experts, retail CIOs, line-of-business executives, and ICT product and service vendors. Our analysts work with subscribers to identify and prioritize specific topics to be covered in research reports. Our analysts are also available to provide personalized advice for retail executives and ICT vendors to help them make better-informed decisions.

Throughout the year, this service will address the following topics:

• Worldwide trends and challenges related to retail commerce and DTC business processes and applications
• Retail commerce and DTC maturity stages and benchmarks and their specific characteristics
• Disruptive technologies that will enable retail commerce and DTC in the short and long term
• The integration of retail ecommerce operations with overall retail operations
• Cases of collaboration among consumer companies in the retail ecommerce and DTC spaces

Our research addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

1. What are the key commerce capabilities that retailers need to implement in the short and long term?
2. What are the best practices to merge ecommerce capabilities and store systems capabilities?
3. What are the new key retail business use cases to innovate commerce capabilities?
4. What are the best practices to build a proprietary marketplace in retail? How can retailers best integrate their ecommerce systems with third-party marketplaces?
5. Which new commerce operational models should retailers implement? How should these new models be merged with retailers' overall operational models?

The IDC Retail Insights: Europe, Middle East and Africa Retail Platforms and Technologies service is ideally suited to support the needs of retail business and IT decision-makers and executives (e.g., heads of innovation, heads of strategy, CDOs, CTOs, CIOs, and omni-channel VPs) responsible for running all aspects of companywide retail commerce processes. Technology vendors and consulting and services companies will also benefit from this research as it will provide them with perspectives on retailers' challenges and directions in planning and executing retail commerce strategies.