The recent pandemic fundamentally changed the retail landscape, accelerating ecommerce and permanently altering customer expectations. Shoppers are increasingly focused on immediate fulfillment, personalized experiences, and discovering new products on social commerce shopping hubs. What could be more convenient than buying a product directly from an influencer review on Instagram? Today, the challenge for retailers is not about just selling online or selling in-store. It’s about seamlessly bridging the gap between them to create a convenient and unified, omnichannel shopping experience for customers.
The rising importance of omnichannel in retail
The lines between digital and physical retail continue to blur rapidly, with consumers now expecting a fluid and convenient shopping experience across web, mobile and in-store. Buying online and picking up in-store accounts for 10.23% of global ecommerce sales and is projected to reach a valuation of $666.2 billion by 2028. At the same time, nearly half of US shoppers said they have checked online to see if a product is available in-store, a 6% increase from 2022. When 77% of shoppers use smartphones while shopping in-store , it’s no surprise that some retailers are deploying technology that allows customers to explore products on site while finalizing purchases online for home delivery.
Since customers are increasingly shopping on mobile (77% of retail website traffic globally and 68% of online shopping orders), it is more important than ever for retailers to have a mobile-optimized website with faster page loads to deliver a seamless user experience.
For marketing practitioners, delivering seamless user experience and improving page load speeds continues to be important to stay competitive. Data from our Websites 2025 report revealed that 93% of marketing practitioners identified seamless user experience as an important website functionality for maintaining competitiveness in today’s digital landscape. Likewise, 77% of marketing practitioners identified page load speeds as important.
Key challenges facing retailers
“We mainly face personalization challenges as this really matters to our customers, and this challenge easily puts them off and abandons their engagement.” – Marketing Leader, Websites 2025 Report.
Despite the clear demand for omnichannel experiences, retailers struggle with various barriers including fragmented journeys, poor mobile responsiveness, website performance, personalization, scalability, integration challenges, and checkout complexity leading to high cart abandonment rates.
In 2024 the online shopping cart abandonment rate was a whopping 70.19% according to Statista, highlighting the fact that work needs to be done to reduce the complexity in the checkout process.
While many retailers acknowledge the fact that personalization is important, many still find it difficult to personalize the experience for users consistently across channels. According to McKinsey, companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players.
Omnichannel CMS delivers a unified retail experience
An omnichannel CMS serves as the backbone of modern retail ensuring fast, consistent and personalized experiences across web, mobile, apps, in-store displays and beyond. It centralizes content, integrates seamlessly with external systems for real-time inventory updates, and enables AI-driven personalization to help retailers deliver convenient and unified shopping experiences at scale.
Website speed and performance are crucial for retailers to be successful. A hybrid headless omnichannel CMS ensures that the website performance is good across all channels, delivering a seamless experience regardless of device or touchpoint.
Take the case of The Tile Shop, a leading omnichannel retailer that adapted a headless, composable commerce architecture with XM Cloud, the hybrid headless CMS serving as the backbone for content. This switch enabled them to extend premium in-store experiences online and helped them reduce page load speed from 14 seconds to just 2.7 seconds (5x reduction). In terms of operational efficiency, The Tile Shop cut down development time by 50% and found it 25% faster to deploy content and experiences.
Beyond enhancing customer experience & convenience, an omnichannel CMS provides retailers with scalability and agility, enabling retailers to adapt quickly to market trends, manage high traffic periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and integrate AI for deeper personalization and streamline operations.
Artificial intelligence and the future of retail websites
Retailers have begun to leverage AI to enhance digital shopping experiences, using AI-powered product recommendations, predictive/visual search and automated chatbots to improve engagement and conversion rates. While AI has improved the retail shopping experience, many retailers struggle to unify AI capabilities across their ecosystem. Without a centralized & integrated approach, AI functionalities often operate in silos leading to fragmented & inconsistent customer experiences.
Findings from our AI in marketing study showed that 86% of retailers plan to adopt AI across marketing over the next few years, but only 12% have implemented standardized tools across operations. This highlights a gap in cross-channel innovation, integration & execution resulting in missed opportunities and fragmented shopping experiences.
Embracing standardized AI solutions across channels enables retailers to:
- Enhance real-time personalization across online and in-store delivering consistent content, product recommendations and tailored promotions ensuring a cohesive shopping experience. In fact, 58% of retailers see personalization as their biggest near-term ROI driver, while 74% believe AI will transform customer experience within 3-5 years.
- Improve product discovery with predictive search that integrates with real-time inventory, optimize dynamic pricing and promotion across all touch points.
- Enable voice powered conversational commerce through AI-powered chatbots on digital channels including websites and in-store kiosks to guide customers through product selection, answer questions and even facilitate the transaction process.
- Leverage predictive analytics for returns management and demand forecasting to minimize return rates, optimize inventory management and reduce operational costs while improving customer satisfaction.
Retail digital experiences are rapidly evolving and the organizations that embrace AI, personalization and omnichannel CMS will be best positioned to meet the demands of the future. Moving to standardize tools and modernize CMS capabilities will allow Retailers to create seamless and convenient shopping experiences that drive revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and drive long term brand loyalty.
For deeper insights from industry leaders and practitioners on the future of website technology, personalization, and omnichannel innovation, check out our Websites 2025 report.