Announcing a new Forrester report: The Future Of Commerce (US): Distributed And Dynamic Commerce Strategies Pave The Way To Intelligent Commerce
The cost of doing business is now a moving target, adding more complexity in an already challenging business environment.
US businesses continue to grapple with costly consumer touchpoints and a myriad of challenges to run and grow effectively and profitably. With market volatility permeating global markets, including the threat of retaliatory tariffs, now is the time to deliberately review and expand your commerce strategy to fight growth stagnation in 2025.
Our future of commerce research is based on both data and many executive interviews across retail, hospitality, automotive, travel, technology vendors, and service providers. From this research, we see three distinct and emerging commerce strategies to guide leaders amid volatility — distributed, dynamic, and intelligent. We see that:
Converting a consumer is hard — and in 2025, even more factors impact a purchase. Consumers making a purchase still consider the total cost of that purchase — but core consideration factors also include convenience, product sentiment, brand resonance, and even culture and community. And that’s true across consumer cohorts from Baby Boomers to Gen Alphas.
Social commerce, marketplaces, and genAI are growing, with content and data as the foundation. Among US online adults, 33% say that social media influencers are the primary way that they discover new products. Simultaneously, shoppable media is winning the attention race with younger consumers, fueling “shopping roulette.” Distributed and dynamic commerce strategies have already begun generating the content and data that will power future-state intelligent commerce.
Business and consumer agents are beginning to power next-gen commerce. If Amazon’s recent “Buy for Me” shopping agent is any indication, consumer and business agents are already beginning to complete discrete tasks and tangentially impact product discovery and selection by removing friction in today’s digital experiences. Intelligence, however, is a lot more than completing individual tasks; rather, it is the synthesis of information from multiple sources to make decisions and take action correctly.
There’s much talk today about agentic AI — and there will be more AI innovations tomorrow. As these innovations proliferate in the market, commerce leaders must develop an intelligent commerce strategy with today’s distributed content and dynamic datasets that can evolve and adapt over time. This strategy will be your bedrock for competitive advantage as digital commerce scales across touchpoints in the coming years.
What do distributed, dynamic, and/or intelligent commerce strategies look like for your business?
Let’s talk! If you are assessing new commerce strategies for your business, please get in touch with us — Forrester’s commerce team — for an inquiry or guidance session to explore the right strategy and tactics for your business.
