Attend any cross-channel conference today and you’ll undoubtedly hear a speaker muse about how anywhere from 85-92% of sales (depending on the source) still conclude at stores. And indeed, the retail respondents to our most recent eCommerce survey – out next month – indicate that the vast majority are still conducting a large percentage of their sales in the physical world. This data includes multiple pure-play online retailers, a faction that has started popping up in greater numbers everywhere you look.

However, there is no denying the fact: with each passing day, more sales are concluding online. People are buying things today they wouldn’t have even considered buying online last year. (Figure 1).

Figure 1: More Sales Online Each Year

Source: RSR Research, August 2017

Keep in mind, while asking both this and the following question, we specifically asked retailers to include all digital transactions – including those from 3^rd party marketplaces.

However, for as strong as these numbers are from last year until today, consider where retailers think they’ll be in three years’ time: in fact, even when, one year ago, we asked them where they thought they’d be in 3 years’ time, we see that the pace of migration is moving faster than even retailers could have predicted.

Figure 2: A Strong System Of Belief

Source: RSR Research, August 2017

What does all this rapid change mean for retailers? For starters, it means that the best performers – Retail Winners – are already thinking about this brave new world differently. They are far more likely to think about the digital shopping experience through the lens of “needing to be where the puck will be, not where it is right now “. They are nearly twice as likely to think about anticipating consumer behavioral shifts, despite the fast-paced nature of change within those shifts. They are much more interested in optimizing their inventory deployment – regardless of channel. They have a much greater understanding that existing organizational silos are preventing them from moving forward. And when it comes to technology, they are far more likely to see that their eCommerce platform can successfully serve as the one digital platform they use across all channels. Quite simply: they “get it, ” and we’ll be teasing out all the ways they do in the upcoming report.