Archive
41 articles, newest first.
PaymentsThe post-2024 regulatory tightening on buy-now-pay-later thinned the field. We map where the surviving players added retail value and where they just added friction.
Three years into the post-pandemic correction, returns remain the single biggest hidden cost in direct-to-consumer P&Ls. We look at what's actually working to bring them down.
A practical look at where retailers have replaced human copywriters with LLMs, where they've quietly reverted, and what the unit-economics actually look like.
From beauty to athleisure to grocery, retailers keep shrinking the box. We break down whether the smaller footprint actually moves EBITDA or just trades problems.
The first nearshoring rush was about announcements. The second wave, now underway, is about getting the contracts, the labor, and the ports to actually line up.
SustainabilityWith the first full CSRD reports landing in early 2026, retailers had to put numbers next to commitments. The first lesson: scope 3 is still mostly an estimate, and everyone knows it.
A handful of merchants are running real stablecoin checkout pilots in 2026. The use cases are narrower than the pitch decks, but the savings on cross-border are not imaginary.
Retail media keeps getting called the highest-margin business in retail. We unpack who's actually capturing those margins and who's spending them on tech that doesn't ship.
E-commerceBetween FBA increases, referral fee shifts, and the new low-inventory penalty, the all-in cost of selling on Amazon has quietly crept past the breakpoint for several mid-tier brands.
After a decade of self-checkout, grocers are quietly rebuilding the front end. The new design borrows from convenience stores, not airports.
After more than a year of routing around the Horn of Africa, most carriers have settled into a new normal. Retailers are paying for it in inventory carrying cost, not freight.
After a decade of growth, secondhand and resale platforms are facing the same gross-margin reality that retail learned the hard way. The model isn't dead, but it's getting smaller and pickier.
AI & TechAfter a year of CV-at-the-shelf pilots, the early data shows shrink reduction is real but inconsistent — and the labor it shifts is more than the labor it removes.
With the EU caps holding firm and the Visa-Mastercard settlement in the US under renewed scrutiny, the cost of card acceptance is diverging between the two markets in ways that matter for global retailers.
E-commerceThe end of the $800 de minimis window reshuffled the cross-border map. We track who absorbed the cost, who restructured, and who lost the lane entirely.
Ship-from-store solves a lot, but the labor it consumes inside the four walls is rarely included in the omnichannel ROI story. We tally what's actually getting absorbed.
Supply ChainA turbulent 2024 in Bangladesh, plus tightening compliance regimes in the EU and US, has pushed apparel buyers to fewer, larger vendor relationships. The trade-offs are showing.
AI & TechTwo years into the rip-and-replace MACH wave, several mid-market retailers are re-platforming back to monoliths. Here's the cost they're trying to recover.
SustainabilityThe PPWR set the frame, but national EPR schemes still set the price. We compare what retailers are actually paying per kilogram of packaging across five EU markets.
StoresRetail closures are running hotter than 2024 but cooler than 2020. We track who's pulling out of which markets and what's replacing them.
E-commerceWe pulled together churn data across replenishment, curation, and content-bundle subscription models. The spread between best and worst quartile is wider than most operators think.
We compared inventory turn velocity across major US and EU retailers' most recent disclosures. The improvements are concentrated in fewer places than the headlines suggest.
Tap-to-pay-on-phone removes the dongle for small merchants and adds optionality for mid-market. We look at adoption, the still-unsettled fee structure, and the categories where it's gaining real ground.
Three years ago, electric delivery vans only penciled out in dense urban routes. In 2026, the operating-cost case has broadened — but the upfront capex and depot retrofit costs still tilt the decision.
After the 2024 settlement rejection, the renegotiated version is moving through approval. We translate the latest draft into what it means for merchants' effective interchange.
AI & TechAgent-based shopping — where AI agents transact on behalf of consumers — is shifting from demo to deployment. Retailers are scrambling to figure out which agents to allow, which to block, and how to price for either.
The "store of the future" pilots that drew headlines through 2024 are being quietly evaluated. The data on which ones earn a national rollout — and which ones don't — is finally landing.
Walmart and Amazon now compete more directly than at any point in either company's history. We map where their 2025 strategies actually conflict and where they don't.
Eighteen months after the first big nearshoring announcements, the public progress reports are starting to land. We look at who hit timelines, who slipped, and what changed about the financial case.
Brands are pulling back from retail media networks that can't survive an honest attribution audit. The 2025 budgets are being repriced — and several mid-tier RMNs are about to feel it.
As Klarna's public listing approaches, retailers offering BNPL at checkout are paying attention to disclosed take rates, default trends, and the leverage shift that comes with a public BNPL provider.
The post-pandemic labor crunch has eased, but minimum wage step-ups, scheduling rules, and tighter shrink controls have pushed effective labor cost above where most operators planned.
The resale category spent 2024 confronting unit economics. Early 2025 has been about repricing the model. Here's how the timeline played out.
Top-line numbers said the 2024 holiday season was fine. Margins said something else. We track where the gap shows up in the post-mortem decks operators are circulating internally.
The October port strike was short. The contingency plans were not. We look at the routing changes, inventory cushions, and supplier conversations that stuck after the immediate disruption ended.
SustainabilityWith the first CSRD reporting cycle landing in early 2025, retailers are confronting the cost of incomplete supplier data, partial scope-3 coverage, and audit-ready documentation that doesn't exist yet.
AI & TechA wave of retailers rolled out AI-powered shopping assistants this year. The ones that survived contact with customer behavior look very different from the launch demos.
Spot rates from Asia to North Europe spent the first half of 2024 north of $4,000 per FEU. Shippers are now planning as if those levels are structural, not temporary.
Two Chinese e-commerce platforms reshaped US discretionary spending faster than mid-market retailers could respond. We look at what worked, what didn't, and what the second half of 2024 looks like.
PaymentsThe Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's interpretive rule pulled buy-now-pay-later under credit card protections. Retailers offering BNPL at checkout are quietly recalculating the cost of friction.
Beyond the keynote schedule, the conversations at Shoptalk this March kept coming back to three things: store labor, retail media measurement, and what to do about returns.