December 12, 2017
Globally, omnichannel retail is on the march. Over the last two years, in most countries and categories, retailers have become more mature in enabling consumers to research, compare, purchase, and return products across channels. Yet there is still a wide range of performance. To give retailers a snapshot, we analyzed the omnichannel maturity of 28 countries and nine consumer retail categories and created an index, which uses industry data to rank countries on a scale of 1 to 100 across four dimensions: the degree of digitization for retail sales in a country or category; omnichannel potential; consumer behavior; and technology infrastructure.
This is an update to a similar study we conducted in 2015.
Key findings include the following:
In addition, this report offers case studies of individual countries and categories. Above all, our aim is to give retail executives a detailed picture of the state of omnichannel execution and a quantifiable means of ranking progress across markets so they can adjust their approaches to individual markets accordingly.
Across markets and categories, omnichannel retail is no longer a future aspiration but a baseline requirement. Tech-savvy customers demand it, and companies can either meet this expectation or watch those customers depart for more digitally savvy competitors.
The Global Omnichannel Retail Index ranks countries on a scale of 1 to 100 using independent metrics and data sources across four categories:
The 2017 analysis added 10 countries — Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and Thailand — and dropped India due to insufficient data.