Everyone is well-aware of the ongoing effects of COVID-19 as it continues to wreak havoc in domestic and global supply chains and retail stores. As a result, retailers’ eCommerce operations have been challenged to fill in the gaps for consumers.

But what does all that really mean for retailers? Better yet, the real question is how: how are the best retailers looking at the current landscape? What are they doing (and planning to do) differently? And how is technology going to help? (ie: which technologies are they investing in to help meet their goals?)

To find out, we conducted some custom research and just released it last week. We call it Winning At Customer Acquisition In The Digital Shopping Age, Here are some of the highlights of what we found:

• Retailers have been leaning on search engine spending for years. And yet despite all the spending they’ve allocated, the vast majority aren’t seeing the returns they once hoped for. In fact, nearly one in three of retailers with the highest sales performance (Retail Winners) says they are spending FAR too much on search engine marketing and optimization efforts to garner new prospects, with the remainder most likely to say they are spending slightly too much. Quite simply, retailers are dissatisfied and looking for better tools to help them compete.

• When it comes to the Opportunities at hand, Retail Winners are far more aware of the need to up their game. ALL retailers tell us their number one success factor is new customer acquisition (Winners even more so), but in this age of the attention economy, Winners are also focused on the follow up to that notion: site stickiness. More than 7 out of 10 Retail Winners indicate that this is their path forward to building customer loyalty.

• As it relates to Organizational Inhibitors, technologies are modernizing faster than retailers can absorb them. Technology advancements in the last 5 years have delivered better performance, flexibility, and scalability, and are enabled by an ecosystem of technologies such as microservices, “headless” or “API-first” designs, and cloud-native SaaS platforms, and retailers (rarely accused of being on the bleeding edge) are struggling to keep up. The real problem? Consumers are demanding that they do.

• En masse, retailers see an opportunity in streamlining the digital shopping experience that gets the shopper to a solution easily and in a compelling way. However, two opportunities stand out because they relate to activities that occur after the sale: community interaction between shoppers and replenishment offers. More winners favor these capabilities as a way to keep the dialogue going with consumers. Retailers hope that the more a consumer interacts with them, the better the chances are that the consumer will identify themselves while shopping – in the hope that that in turn will create more opportunities to offer personalized content.

Based on our data, we also offer several in-depth and pragmatic suggestions on how retailers should proceed. These recommendations can be found in the Bootstrap Recommendations portion of the full report, and if you haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet, it is available – for free to all – right here.