The Indian quick commerce market is estimated to reach a GMV of $9.95 billion by 2029.

To cater to the quick commerce model, brands are launching products specifically tailored for rapid delivery. Miniatures, curated kits, and essential skincare items have become popular choices.

With the rise of platforms like Blinkit and Zepto, fashion brands see quick commerce not just as a delivery mechanism, but as a critical part of their retail strategies.

Tech, especially automation, adoption has become a necessary norm to survive increasingly competitive omnichannel trade

With India producing more than two million tonnes of e-waste every year, it has raised some questions about how to reduce this burgeoning issue that poses a threat to the environment. 

Cross-border e-commerce unlocks a world of limitless opportunities for company growth and global influence because of its ability to interact with clients across the world and transcend geographical borders.

Innovation in mattresses is not just limited to health benefits. It is also very demographic-driven.

Analysis of the supply chain, inventory, and POS data provides retailers with a pre-emptive prospect of quick re-arrangement of merchandise, stores, and logistics to stay aligned with the changing market dynamics.  

Many brands have picked up the Metaverse space to create their experiences, like Rexona's Marathon Run, Close-Up worked on a City of Love in Decentraland, Magnum Ice Cream made an entire museum.

To quantify digital marketing ROI for money invested, you really want to realize the amount you've spent on a mission and the amount you've acquired from it.

Let's take a deep dive to understand how an integrated payments POS solution can benefit your business:

Pilots of L-Commerce marketplaces running around India have yielded encouraging results.

In order to stay competitive, D2C brands are adopting hybrid business models as margins drop, CAC rises, and competition grows.

With a high-quality talent pool and unmatched cost advantages, homegrown apps and platforms not only have it in them to survive the tough e-commerce market but also grow into businesses that dominate on the global stage.

Retailers must invest in robust camera-enabled systems for greater data collecting, processing, and analysis if they want smart retail to become even smarter.

Coined in 2016 by Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin, the term FemTech is making waves in the health sector. Here's why.

The emergence of suggestion-based shopping, influencer, and creator-led live commerce, and other factors that give consumers a rich and innovative buying experience from the comfort of their homes have undoubtedly given social commerce a significant boost

With e-commerce now a part of mainstream retail, livestream shopping can facilitate greater customer satisfaction while benefitting both brands and buyers. 

The link between online and offline channels is emerging as a symbiotic relationship for both models.

Customers who shop online today expect personalization, and there are many use cases for boosting the sales process with personalization throughout the entire customer journey in the B2B sector where the buying cycle can be terribly complex.

Establishing an open network for social commerce will be a game-changer not just for MSMEs in terms of opportunities and growth, but it is India's next step toward building a self-reliant and independent economy. 

Omnichannel CX is a unified approach to customer service that engages customers across multiple touchpoints, such as phone, email, social media, chat, and more.

With the brakes being put on new investments across the spectrum, Indian Q-commerce players are feeling the pinch as well.

Quick Commerce is simply the advancement of e-commerce in which the entire product trade is based on the speed of delivery.

Doing advertising via influencer marketing is relatively reasonable as compared with other forms of advertising.

E-commerce is, by its very nature, an extremely experimental industry. Try out fresh concepts and put new developments into practice that support your objectives.

Since most customers prefer shopping online, Augmented Reality in retail is vying to make it more user-centric

The meat industry needs an overhaul. While leading D2C meat brands have transformed the experience of meat purchase for consumers, the purchase experience for bulk buyers continues to remain archaic.

Just like live streaming is beneficial for the audience to understand the brand in depth on a real-time basis, it is equally advantageous for the brand to understand the reach they have gained.

To make a transformation successful, organizations need to align their strategies with business realities that call for changes in operating models.

Live Commerce is largely a creator economy where content consumption happens via influencers or brands that people are engaging with on a personal level and who trust each other in a close-knit community.

Payment touches every consumer and small business in India and with all the available options one has to give the customers the option to choose how they want to pay.

The user journey has changed many folds. Google with its set of product suites like Google My Business, Youtube, cloud platforms, shopping platforms, etc. is enabling retailers to make that transition towards manifesting a digital transformation.

In the age of Metaverse, the more a consumer knows about a brand, the more they are able to relate to it and eventually be loyal to it.

Blended physical and digital platforms will deliver a seamless and ubiquitous buying journey. It will be one connected ecosystem elevating the consumers' end-to-end experience. 

In the contactless world of digital retail, however, providing a high-touch experience required vibrant use of digital tools and innovation.

The Metaverse has the potential to transform the way we communicate and shape our experiences using an additional multi-dimensional layer by merging the physical and the virtual worlds more realistically.

Factors like high customer expectations, panic buying, fluctuating trends, and ambiguous consumer data have led to manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, all finding it difficult to forecast the actual demand.

With no access to physical markets, people were left with little option but to use online platforms to make purchases, and online purchasing emerged as a lifeline for both retailers as well as consumers.

According to reports, online stores with a social media presence, such as a Facebook and/or Instagram account, have 32 percent more sales than the average store that is not present on social media.

Firms need to consider a company-wide perspective - a cross-functional relationship truly powered via technology that benefits every pocket - internally as well as externally.

In FY23, along with grocery - the mainstream categories of e-commerce (electronics, fashion, footwear, and others) will adopt the same concept from Q-commerce and move their inventories further closer to the customers.

The retail sector has been witnessing technological intervention for the last few years and it is expected that it will see the introduction of many more technologies in the years to come.

NFTs can also be a boon for retail procurement and supply chain as they can ensure and provide a certificate of authenticated physical goods.

At IReC (Industry of Retail and E-commerce summit) 2022, Muthukumar Kandasamy, Director of Engineering, Caratlane talked about the strategies that the brand has adopted to enhance consumer experience and how important is technology in today's time.

Social Commerce' has become an axis point for businesses to drive their content, community, commerce, and lower costs of customer acquisitions.

With the onset of bidding big in advertising, marketers can use the Metaverse to flex their creative muscles in a lucrative new space as now more than ever it is evident that Metaverse real estate is surging and the time to take a giant leap is right now.

"We are enabling and establishing protocol for multiple platforms to come together and interact within a common language," T Koshy, MD and CEO, ONDC said.

To make an even bigger effect of Metaverse many brands have come up with their games to attract the consumers more effectively.

BNPL in B2B has leveled the playing field for businesses that were previously neglected and deprived of access to essential resources like regulated credit lines and working capital.

Post pandemic, the rise of D2C brands on social media platforms is on an upward trajectory and is projected to touch the whopping value of $100 billion by 2025.

Brands are better off if they prepare themselves with a nascent Metaverse strategy.

Since January of last year, more than 250 million Snapchatters have engaged with AR shopping Lenses more than 5 billion times.

So what does all of this eventually lead to or if we flip the question around, what does the future of retail really look like for businesses and consumers?

According to Juniper Research, the use of voice assistants will be at 8 billion by 2023, from 2.5 billion in 2018.

Lenskart has an inventory management system; it has a unique and specific barcode system.

The rise of tech-powered start-ups and online market players, as well as investment commitments by leading brands, indicate that businesses have realised the value of building internal capabilities involving smart commerce to become “Smart organization"

According to a survey by Snapbizz, smart Kirana stores are the best proposition for the shopper not just in terms of order fulfillment but also in terms of prices.

The question retail brands should be asking is not when's the right time to enter the Metaverse, but rather how well are they prepared to unleash a parallel economy?

From Augment Reality (AR) to Virtual Reality (VR) tools, live commerce to social commerce, such immersive state-of-the-art technology being effortlessly integrated by the beauty brands has opened a new world of opportunities.

Let's have a look at the various brands that are changing the game in the retail industry by integrating Metaverse technology in their retail operations.

A RedSeer survey found that less than 10 percent of riders see it as a long-term career opportunity. Still, this business model will boom, reaching $5 billion by 2025.

Headless Commerce is also called API-based commerce as the communication between the frontend and the backend happens through application programming interface (API) calls. 

One of the key driving factors behind the sudden boom of Quick Commerce has surely been the pandemic-led restrictions and stay-at-home mandates.

The Metaverse has been booming over the past few years and so have its advances in technology such as AR, VR, etc.

Abroad, brands like Gucci, Ferrari, adidas, Dominos, Nike are stepping ahead to experiment with the Metaverse world, the market of Metaverse is still at its nascent stage in India.

The future of metaverse commerce in retail appears bright as it will provide consumers with a non-traditional design experience wherein brands can transform their old-fashioned malls to new-age shopping hubs for customers in the virtual reality domain.

Around 62 percent of purchase decisions are now influenced by online discovery.

This new venture aims to provide rapid delivery services, ensuring that its customers can receive their favorite VIP inners products right at their doorstep in no time.

As technology evolves, keeping an eye on how it will be able to uplift and ease the lives of the fast rising rural and economically weaker classes, is going to be key for all digital services and commerce in the future.

Q-commerce firms must use mobile apps benchmarked for fast order completion.

The customer retention rate for omnichannel is 90 percent higher than for a single channel when a business has a solid omnichannel strategy for the business.

Legacy jewelers praise how AI is helping them gauge the market faster and better

New innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), blockchain (blockchain), the internet of things (IoT), live chat (ChatBots), and other areas are driving the expansion of the D2C and e-commerce sectors.

Smart stores are essentially brick-and-mortar stores that have been established using innovative technologies like digital payments and voice commerce.

To meet their customers' expectations with the evolving market scenario, B2B e-commerce players have started embracing digital adoption.

However, in recent times, many companies first went online and did digital retailing and then are now wondering, are they missing out on something big by not going offline in physical retailing?

It is imperative that brands create new relevance in the world of digital sameness by continually enhancing their personalization.

The pandemic led to a worldwide divergence and played a great role in influencing the masses' outlook of purchasing.

The e-retail market is expected to grow to $120–140 billion by FY26, increasing at approximately 25–30 percent annually over the next five years.

Q-commerce has made inroads into Indian cities making small quantities of goods available to consumers with instant delivery on a whenever and wherever need basis.

The COVID-19 pandemic had put an enormous strain on food supply systems, causing bottlenecks in farm labor, processing, transportation, and logistics.

Quick commerce is disrupting the way how the on-demand delivery industry operates.

The online world, flush with data and a capability to test and tweak in real-time, has been able to use artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to personalize user journeys.

From creating virtual (called synthetic) models to automate image generation, to creating world-class content using AI, merchants are tapping into new customer cohorts through targeted media.

Phygital is the new normal, and successful brands will be the ones that embrace digital technologies much before others to deliver a flawless omnichannel experience to customers.

Going ahead, 2022 will witness a greater emphasis on highly personalized one-to-one advertising, mobile advertising with in-app and in-game ads, video advertising, etc.

From opportunities offered by new tech to challenges posed by the climate crisis, the industry anticipates a dynamic year in which competition is fierce, innovation is critical and the potential gains are significant.

Retailers have emerged out from the profound upheavals by embracing new opportunities: the customer-first approach, friction-less shopping, utilizing technology, providing real-time solutions, and many more.

Between October and December 2020, FMCG & Healthcare (F&H) category volume grew by 46 percent year-on-year (YOY), as per the Q4 2020 E-commerce Trends Report by Unicommerce and Kearney.