Your Customers Have Already Moved. Has Your Brand?
Commentary By Sreeraman MG, Co-Founder, Fynd
Every major technology shift in retail has come with the same quiet reassurance: there’s time.
Subscribe to TRBOmnichannel took years to mature. Headless commerce gave brands room to experiment. Retailers who moved late still caught up. The message was always the same — watch, wait, and follow when the path is clearer.
This one is different. Not just in degree. In kind.
The shift that’s already happening
Previous technology waves changed how retailers operated behind the scenes. Omnichannel connected channels. Headless made it easier to build and manage digital storefronts. Both were internal upgrades. The customer didn’t notice them. And that gave brands the luxury of time.
This wave doesn’t work that way.
Something fundamental is changing in how shoppers actually behave. How they look for products, how they compare options, and how they decide what to buy. And that shift isn’t waiting for the industry to catch up. Traffic from newer discovery channels to retail websites grew 4,700% year over year by mid-2025 according to Adobe Digital Insights. Shoppers arriving through these channels are spending 45% more time on site, viewing 13% more pages, and converting 31% better than those coming from traditional sources like paid search or email. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Retail Outlook puts it plainly: consumer discovery behaviour is undergoing its most significant structural shift since the rise of mobile commerce.
The channels most retailers have spent years and serious money building are now being outperformed.
A conversation that made this real for me
Earlier this year, I was on a panel at Retail Ecom North in Manchester with two very different retailers. One was the founder of a young eyewear startup building from scratch. The other was the Head of Architecture at one of the UK’s most established fashion retailers. Different sizes. Different budgets. Very different challenges.
But they kept arriving at the same conclusion.
With every previous technology wave, there was room for a slow, considered response. A pilot. A phased rollout. A business case built over quarters. This time, there isn’t that room. Because by the time you’ve finished deliberating, your customer has already moved on.
I’ve been in retail technology long enough to recognise when something is genuinely different. And this is. The shift happening right now isn’t about what’s inside a retailer’s systems. It’s about what’s happening inside the customer’s head and how they’re choosing to spend their time and money. PwC’s 2025 Consumer Intelligence Survey found that 52% of consumers now say they are open to using automated tools to help them research and shortlist products before they buy.
That’s not a niche early-adopter statistic. That’s more than half of your customer base already leaning in.
The boring problem that matters most
Most retail product data was built for keyword search. Category names, filters, basic attributes. That was fine when shoppers were navigating themselves.
That’s no longer enough.
Today’s discovery channels interpret rather than just search. To surface the right product, they need to understand that a “breathable linen shirt in navy, good for a summer wedding” means something specific. That requires product data that’s rich, structured and full of context — not just “men’s shirts, blue, linen.” McKinsey found that retailers with outdated or fragmented data were 30% more likely to run into problems keeping up with how discovery is evolving. In plain terms, their data simply wasn’t ready. EY’s retail practice puts the problem more starkly: fewer than one in three retailers currently have product data structured well enough to perform in contextual, intent-led discovery environments.
KPMG’s 2026 retail report found that 64% of retail CEOs say this is their top investment priority this year. But investment without the right foundations is a bit like renovating your shop window while the roof leaks. It looks good from the outside, but it won’t hold. And right now, most of the investment is going into the window.
Doing nothing is still a choice
With past technology shifts, waiting had a cost, but it was a manageable one. Miss the early omnichannel wave? You could catch up. Delay your headless migration? Customers probably wouldn’t notice.
The cost of waiting now adds up every single month.
Every month your product data isn’t structured for modern discovery is a month where your competitors are being recommended to shoppers and you aren’t. Every quarter spent building the internal business case is a quarter where customer habits are forming, without you in the mix.
Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2030, nearly half of online shoppers will rely on assistant-led experiences to research and buy, accounting for around 25% of total online spending. Accenture’s retail research from late 2025 echoes this, finding that brands which establish visibility in emerging discovery channels early are capturing disproportionate share and that the gap between early movers and late adopters is widening, not narrowing.
Gartner framed it well in their 2025 Digital Commerce report: the brands most at risk aren’t the ones that tried and failed. They’re the ones that waited to see how things played out.
What to actually do about it
The good news is that the practical steps aren’t complicated. They’re just not the exciting stuff.
Start with your product data. Make it richer and more descriptive. Think about how a real person would describe your product to a friend, not just how a search algorithm would tag it. Build in context like occasion, use case, fit, feel. Make sure your inventory, pricing and availability are updated in real time. Then go and check how your products actually appear in modern discovery experiences today. The results might surprise you.
Then ask the bigger questions. What happens to the customer relationship when discovery starts in a conversation you’re not part of? Is your backend set up to handle new types of traffic? Are your teams still thinking in channels, or are they thinking about the full customer journey?
Deloitte’s retail technology practice has been consistent on this point: the retailers seeing the strongest returns from this shift are those who treated it as a customer strategy question first, and a technology question second. The tech follows once you’ve answered who you’re trying to stay visible to, and where.
These aren’t questions for next year. They’re questions for right now.+
The window is open, but not for long
Every big platform shift in retail has rewarded the brands that moved early. Mobile commerce. Social commerce. The early movers built advantages that took competitors years to close.
The same opportunity exists today. But the window is moving faster than any shift before it. Because the people setting the pace aren’t the platforms or the technology vendors. They’re the shoppers.
Across the 2,300+ brands we work with at Fynd, the ones moving fastest aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who’ve understood something fundamental: this isn’t about upgrading your technology. It’s about staying visible to a customer who is already shopping differently.
The question every brand needs to answer isn’t whether this shift will matter. That’s already settled. The question is whether you’ll be ready when your customer comes looking for your products through channels you haven’t optimised for yet.
For most brands today, the honest answer is no. That’s not criticism. It’s actually an opportunity. But only if you start now.
