A Shortened Holiday Season Puts the Pressure on Retailers

At the top of a retailer’s wish list for the holiday season would surely be that supply meets demand, particularly as the holiday season will have five fewer shopping days than other years. Many retailers are already on it with promotional offers to entice consumers into early holiday shopping. However, early promotions and seasonal spikes, combined with an erratic global supply chain, forms the perfect storm for outages and logistical failures in the run up to the holiday season.

Retailers need underlying infrastructure that will ensure critical information is available in real time to match customer demands with supply chain issues. This is critical to keeping retailers happy and consumer spirits high during the festive period.

1. This holiday season is shorter, promotions are starting sooner, but is your business able to move with the new times?

The 2024 holiday season will be shorter than normal, with only 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It cuts off five full days of shopping, forcing many merchants to launch promotions sooner to capture early demand and drive sales before the traditional rush. In fact, we’ve already seen major U.S. retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Amazon.com introduce early deals to beat the rush.

Despite the shortened holiday period and increased inflation squeezing consumer budgets, 80 percent of online and in-store retailers are still optimistic there will be growth in U.S. retail sales this year.

Earlier promotions will of course pull sales forward, so the need to have the right products in time and at a fair price early in the season is clear to see. To succeed, retailers need to see the data that tells them that their supply will meet their demand. It’s where their underlying systems architecture will make or break retail success this festive period.

2. How do we keep all eyes on the customer to meet their needs? Seamless omnichannel experiences!

2024 has been a year of disruptions. We’ve been there before with the Suez Canal crisis in 2021 and the Panama Canal drought in 2023. This year, we’ve experienced new supply chain disruptions: port strikes; canal disruptions such as in the Red Sea; more severe climate- and weather-related scenarios that have hindered operations; and even manufacturing cycles that are still emerging from the pandemic. All continue to play a large role in disrupting retail operations.

As we approach the holiday season, customer service remains top of the agenda. That means managing volume spikes, minimizing waste, preventing stockouts, and optimizing supply chain operations. Spinning the plates is no solution; providing a seamless retail experience across all shopping channels is. It’s crucial for customer satisfaction, loyalty and business success. An effective omnichannel strategy is essential and this needs a re-examination of the business infrastructure.

An event mesh — supported by event-driven architecture — serves as the backbone for true omnichannel integration. It captures customer interactions as events from various touchpoints, such as website clicks, mobile app usage, in-store beacons, and point-of-sale systems. These events are then processed in real time, allowing artificial intelligence agents to build and continuously update a comprehensive customer profile.

When a customer moves from one channel to another, the mesh ensures that their context follows them. For example, if a customer abandons an online cart and later enters a physical store, the system can notify a sales associate with product recommendations based on the customer’s online browsing history, enabling a personalized in-store experience.

3. Is personalized pricing possible? Meet the digital price tag.

Personalization is as important as ever, and that even applies to pricing. For retailers, it’s huge. Customers are far more likely to partake in product offers as they browse an aisle rather than waiting until they reach checkout.

There is also the potential for fully connected, personalized pricing. Digital price tags could take into account events being generated across a product’s supply chain, such as cost price, availability, etc., combined with customer data and behavior to deliver personalized in-store prices or offers in real time to individual consumers.

For 76 percent of retail executives, consumers will value lower prices over brand loyalty. To stand out in a value-focused environment, retailers must consider personalized omnichannel experiences that provide the value and convenience that price-wary consumers will likely be seeking.

4. Why should someone else’s problem become yours? It’s time to welcome the event mesh.

As we look to the future, the integration of physical robotics with AI, and an event mesh with agentic AI, presents exciting possibilities. Just as automated guided vehicles have revolutionized warehouses, similar technologies could transform the in-store experience, from restocking shelves to assisting customers.

A seamless retail experience must cross the whole business: employees, suppliers, and customers. An event mesh, powered by agentic AI, is uniquely positioned to address the pressures associated with the retail holiday season. By creating a unified, real-time data network, it enhances supply chain visibility and agility, enabling quick responses to disruptions.

Essentially, the event mesh serves as a flexible, responsive retail ecosystem that adapts to changing market conditions, customer preferences, and technological advancements. It enables real-time decision-making, enhanced personalization, and provides a holistic view of all events across an entire organization. It’s dynamic, open, simple and available everywhere.

Personalized shopping puts the right products in the right place at the right time, and at the right personalized price. It’s what ultimately will make this holiday season one where all those consumer wishes come true!

Ush Shukla is a distinguished engineer at Solace, an enabler of event-driven architecture for real-time enterprises.