Retail Pulse Report: Retail Tech Show 2025

UK retailers attempt to manifest optimism in the face of increasing challenges.

Image Source: H&M’s Social Fitting Room, via @bellaanapoli on TikTok

As promised, this week reviews the Retail Technology Show, this year at ExCel in London. Coming right off the heels of Shoptalk in Las Vegas, it’s hard not to make comparisons, even though they are fundamentally different shows. One is trying to broaden out from digital roots, the other covers a breadth of retail topics.

Shoptalk had more attendees, but it’s possible that RTE had more exhibitors. The energy at Shoptalk felt frantic. The energy at RTE was really more positive and determined. RTE felt more grounded and pragmatic.

Which is all well and good, but the most important question is still: what did we learn? Let’s dive in!

RTS 2025 Show Themes: A Big Tent

Last week, when I took issue with Shoptalk’s overall theme of “Retail’s Golden Age,” I did not take issue with any of the individual tracks. From that perspective, there was a lot of choose from and you could have attended a completely different show from me and not even noticed.

RTS 2025 emphasized a carnival atmosphere (you could have ridden a carousel of you wanted, and I think there were bumper cars?), but it honestly came across more like a big tent, with all kinds of things going on. We’re all held together by the industry we’re in, but there was room for lots of different perspectives. In that sense, I would say it was a more positive and relevant theme than Shoptalk’s.

As a smaller show overall, and in a tighter space, the event organizers grouped everything together into 6 main tracks: the future of trading; leadership, workforce, economy; customer, social, marketing; AI, data, omnichannel; sustainability, supply chain, efficiency; and the future of retail. As a show that covers all aspects of retail, it’s a bigger agenda with more ground to cover.

Also, the show occurred during the so-called “Liberation Day” reveal of Trump’s tariffs. And the Brits tried very hard to not to let that overshadow the event itself, which was already focused on how to navigate and prosper in an uncertain future anyway.

My big take-away from the show is nuanced. “Omnichannel” truly does mean different things in different geographies. This, I have learned over the years. Omnichannel in Chile would be stunted to an American’s eyes. The very long, narrow geography makes it extremely uneconomical to ship things back and forth, so stores often operate as regional hubs. Australia has similar challenges as Chile, with 2 coasts and a middle that is no joke to drive through. And while the US is shorter across than Australia, and wider than Chile is long, we don’t really face these challenges.

Same for the UK vs US. for a lot of UK retailers, click & collect is omnichannel – but all they’re doing is shipping from warehouse to store for customer pickup. They’re not truly leveraging inventory in every location like a BOPIS use case might in the US. Geography helps explain some of the difference – you can pretty much ship anything to any part of the UK in about four hours, if you put your warehouse in the right place. The US might be able to overnight from coast to coast, but a four hour window would force the creation of a lot of smaller regions to manage.

Omnichannel may be different in different geographies due to regulations, customs, costs, and even literally the geography. But one thing that seems to be the same everywhere is unified commerce. And that is different than omnichannel, in that it is more focused on the customer experience than on fulfilling customer demand. When you ask someone “what does omnichannel mean” you immediately get cross-channel use cases like BOPIS/Click & Collect or buy online return to store, etc. When you ask “what does unified commerce mean” people tend to get more thoughtful and talk about moving with customers seamlessly across channels.

Unified commerce wasn’t explicitly called out on the agenda at RTS, but it was there under the covers. I’ll show you want I mean in two parts.

Part 1: The need for offline

Paul Sims, the former chief architect of M&S, gave a speech titled “Forgetting Offline – Do Stores Really Need Special Treatment?” I will admit that I got there late, and it was already at capacity, so I had to listen through the drape (my one complaint about the show is that the theaters were too small). I say that only because I assume I missed some things by not having the visuals, so you should take my comments with that constraint in mind.

The foundation of the topic was the idea that stores should no longer need offline. I have a feeling he was trying to be provocative, rather than completely serious about it. As he delved more into the topic, it became clear that the point was really something else. If I could have rewritten his speech, I would’ve focused more on “stupid things that derail store innovation and shouldn’t” rather than going straight after offline as useless.

The problem with stores is that they’re islands. They live at the edge of the enterprise, and a lot of technology in retail has been designed specifically to address the barriers to real time, always online communication between stores and the head office. Trickle polling, store servers, much of the hardware and networking choices in stores are driven by a need to keep the store/HQ connection as cheap as possible.

Paul Sims’ point was that you can no longer make an investment decision about tech in stores based on “Yeah, but will it work if the store is offline?”. I agree with that – there are many things that are worthless or risky if the store is offline. You should not be selling inventory that is not in the store if you’re not online. You could possibly apply some kind of time decay on the probability that inventory is still available or not, but if there’s something wrong with store connectivity, is it really worth it to try to sell inventory that you can’t confirm as held for your shopper right then and there? But back to the point, just because you can’t save the sale when the store is offline, does not mean that you should not offer save the sale at all.

But there were two points that Paul raised that I took issue with. One was that there are plenty of failover options to make network issues a non-issue. While it’s true that you can failover the network to 5G, or invest in an array of backup options, those are all expensive. It’s easy to say you should have triple failover options for a store the size of M&S. It’s a lot harder to say that’s necessary for small specialty footprint, and there are still plenty of places in the world where the networking options are not so widely available. I know many retailers who have to rely on satellite for some locations, or line-of-sight radio, depending on where you are in the world.

The other point I take issue with is that offline is useless. I’m all for retailers having a more realistic idea about what should work offline vs. online, as we seem to have drifted away from reality on this topic – we often hear “I don’t want any customer data on the local device AND ALSO why can’t I have loyalty points lookup when the device is offline?” Sigh, sure.

But offline isn’t just about what my colleague John Carney calls “the mythical fiber-seeking backhoe”. It’s about ensuring a consistency in experience as a device moves across the store. The fastest way to get a mobile device stuffed into a drawer to gather dust is to subject a store associate (and a customer) to the fabulous experience of a great shoulder-to-shoulder shopping journey, only to have the payment glitch when the customer taps their card – just as the device switches from one access point to the next. That moment when you look at each other, and both of you are asking the same questions: did that go through or not? What should we do next – try again? Is that going to double charge the customer?

Those are terrible feelings to have. That’s why the device ends up in the drawer, because no one wants to experience that over and over. Or, have to explain to a consumer that you can’t walk with them to the door while you’re ringing them up because you don’t want the transaction to get messed up. Why bother with mobile at all?

So I agree that offline-capable should not be the barrier for every store investment. There will be more and more that comes into a store that requires always online in order to work. And retailers need to get over the idea that they can have minimal bandwidth to stores and be effective. HQ knows more about customers than stores do, these days, and every store investment should be evaluated via the lens of “does this help the store associate keep up, if not get ahead?”.

But I also push back: the ability to seamlessly process transactions, no matter the quality of the network, is important. The ability to inspire confidence in store associates that using mobile is not inferior or a waste of time is important. That confidence, I would argue, is essential to getting store associates to buy into the more innovative stuff, network strategy or otherwise.

Part 2: Making the store truly unified

Ariel Haroush, the chairman & founder of Future Stores and design agency Outform, presented on “The Experience Economy – Elevating Retail for the Modern Shopper”. Future Stores has a high-activation space that they use for limited-run events. He shared this Renault example in the speech.

On one level, this is exactly what Paul Sims was talking about – could you imagine a retailer choosing to pixelate every inch of a store? And keeping it connected enough to regularly feed it content updates to keep that fresh and live? But what you get from that investment – I think we’re only starting to scratch the surface of what it could mean in retail. What is pixelated, you can measure. You can measure dwell time and engagement (and sales, of course). You can test different types of content. You can change the feel of the store from day time to night time. You can operate a store during the day and a nightclub at night.

So yeah, making this kind of investment is really tough for retailers, because it’s a lot, and it’s not going to last 10 years, and while Future Stores is making a business case, it’s not a well-established given. That’s easy to derail with “but what happens if the store is offline?”

But Ariel’s point went further, and this is the most important point to me: as retailers and brands increasingly invest in their online experiences, and even their pop-up activations, is the store keeping up? The answer is no. And while you could argue, not every store needs to look as crazy as that Renault activation, stores aren’t even meeting basic thresholds:

• Are you merchandising your stores to feature the same products featured in the hero images on your website?

• Are you even using the same imagery in stores as online?

• Do you feature the same things? Are you promoting resale in your stores if you’re promoting it online? Are you highlighting spring dresses with same fervor in stores if you’re promoting those online?

• Are store associates aware of influencer activity?

• Do your stores have their own social media presence?

You can’t slow down digital. And so your stores must be able to participate and keep up with digital.

What Did We Learn This Week?

Unified commerce is more than just “omnichannel”. But when people talk about “bringing digital into stores” I often find that the end result is disappointing and/or very difficult to sustain over time. While I was in London, I visited a store on Regent Street that had a shoe-finding kiosk. But once you narrowed it down to a few shoes, there was no in store connection – no sizes available in store, no prices, not even a way to share the result to my own phone. Phygital? I guess. Unified? No.

Every aspect of the store needs to move at the speed of digital. If you’re going to feature spring dresses online, then you should have that up front and center as soon as someone walks in a store. If you’re highlighting an influencer online, you need to bring that content in stores. If you’re going to offer resale online, you need to integrate it into the store.

That’s in addition to being able to reach into any location to secure inventory for any shopper – with confidence. In addition to accepting returns purchased anywhere at any location. In addition to arming the store associate with as much relevant knowledge about the customer standing in front of her as HQ knows about that customer.

What happens in a store has mostly remain unchanged for decades, if not centuries. That’s while how consumers find and select products has changed dramatically. It’s finally, finally time to start rethinking exactly what purpose a store serves in the shopper journey, and how every store – not just the pop-up, not just the flagship store – can help facilitate that journey.

Next week I’ll be back on track with the usual economic indicators, retail, and AI in retail news. There, uh, have been a few things that happened in the last two weeks. I saved some choice ones. Stay tuned!

- Nikki