Retail Critical Issues

Younger consumers in the UK feel more optimistic than those over 35 and are likely to be more willing to embrace the lockdown loosening when it happens.

With many UK brick-and-mortar stores remaining closed, new data from commerce experience leader, Bloomreach, shows that retailers are closing the sales gap through their digital offerings – with online sales in the UK increasing 27% from the same time year-on-year and increasing by 23% from last week.

With the global coronavirus pandemic continuing to damage health systems and economies worldwide, there is a desperate need to start transitioning out of lockdown and reopen communities and cities in the safest way possible. Shapes AI, a computer vision and artificial intelligence company, has launched a platform to support this transition by tracking and monitoring social distancing and the wearing of masks.

Shoppers may never return to the high street after lockdown, warns the home delivery firm ParcelHero, as March ONS retail sales results show e-commerce sales rose 12.5% YOY in the wake of the Covid-19 epidemic.

What can retailers learn from the lockdown and could it be the death-knell of the store, asks Tania Oakey, a retail expert at software vendor Cegid?

Business will never be the same again after Coronavirus. In the UK, a report from the Centre of Retail Research has predicted that over 20,000 stores will never reopen due to the damage caused by the pandemic on retail and consumer spending.

Following the news that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is applying pressure on insurers to settle business interruption (BI) claims to SMEs, Ben Carey-Evans, Insurance Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

Kevin Brundish, CEO of AMTE Power, commenting on the need for a strong, onshore supply chain in the face of global uncertainty.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is often the first step organisations take on the path to cloud adoption. It is a flexible, cost-effective way to deliver essential DR capability without all the CAPEX costs and pains of managing a physical DR site.

Webroot has released its annual AI and machine learning (ML) report which reveals that 89% of IT professionals believe their company could be doing more to defend against cyber-attacks, and illuminates ongoing AI/ML confusion – with 64% admitting they are not sure what AI/ML means – despite increased adoption at a global scale.

Following the release of data exploring the significant impact that the COVID-19 pandemic is having on the mental health of the public and calls from experts and charities to research the long-term impact of the crisis.