Retail’s Next Move: Fixing the Digital Shelf and the Shrinking Online Basket

or

The “Hertz Donut” of Online Retail:
Where Browsing is Painful and Baskets are smaller

I’d like to introduce you to what Bart Simpson might call the “Hertz Donut” of online retail - You promise your other half you’ll do the big supermarket shop online this week, confident it’ll save time and still get everything.

Instead, you take longer and end up scratching your head over a basket about 40% smaller than usual, all while the clock’s ticking and aforementioned other-half ‘s due back home sooner than you can get to the store. What the heck did I forget??

(Hurts, don’t it?)

I went through this recently and it highlighted something we don’t talk about enough. Online retail, despite everything it gets right behind the scenes, still doesn’t meet the needs of today’s online shopper. It’s great if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but significantly not great, not great at ALL if you don’t (being generous there!) – which leads to forgotten items, smaller baskets, and unnecessary frustration.

That’s not just bad for the shopper. It’s quietly bad for retailers too. Smaller baskets add up, and every missed item is lost revenue they may not even realise is slipping away.

So ... as a side-effect of venting that small migraine, I wrote a short piece exploring these friction points and the hidden revenue losses they create. Retail Technology Innovation Hub have kindly published it.

👉 Here’s the full article: “Retail’s next move - here's why it’s time to reimagine e-commerce”

Marc Foreman, Co-CEO