Retail's global innovators:
T-Z

Temu
(China)

Although signs of a slowdown in its growth were revealed in Q2 results reported in August by parent company PDD Holdings, China-based Temu has transformed the ecommerce market in the US and Europe post-pandemic.  

By gamifying the buying experience and flaunting low prices on everyday household items and essentials that undercut even Amazon, Temu has seized significant market share at the expense of incumbent players in countries including the UK – where it only launched in April 2023. 

Temu’s power lies in its ability to ship products straight from the factory floor in China to around 50 countries, as well as its aggressive investment in marketing that has resulted in a highly visible presence in search engines.  

In terms of product development, Temu and sister company Pinduoduo – which itself is giving Alibaba and JD.com a run for their money in terms of digital commerce dominance in China – are quick to analyse data on market trends and feed that back to manufacturers. Temu has a strong stable of micro-influencers too, giving it a powerful voice on social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, where many Gen Z shoppers browse and make purchasing decisions. 

Temu has benefited from following a policy of raising brand awareness first and foremost, with less of a regard for profitability. As the pendulum of focus swings to the bottom line, the hope for Temu is that it will have strongly established its name outside China among consumers. 

Tesco
(UK)

This year has been a big one for Tesco. In June 2024, the UK’s largest retailer launched an online marketplace to increase its product ranges and categories, and open itself up to a potentially larger audience while providing greater media and ad-selling opportunities to drive revenue. In August, less than two months after it launched, it announced that it had more than doubled its SKUs on the platform due to demand. 

Sustainability is another tech investment area. Tesco’s F&F fashion arm started trialling digital product passports in August, supported by technology company Fabacus, as the retailer works on building transparency throughout its supply chain to give consumers a greater chance of understanding product provenance. The move was made to keep pace with heightened EU legislation around supply chain traceability. 

Not to be outdone by non-food divisions in the group, Tesco’s core grocery business continues to find new ways of embracing technology in its operations too. It has tapped into Star Refrigeration’s AI-enabled tech to save energy costs in stores and used Dunnhumby’s capabilities to localise and improve ranging. It has also continued to trial autonomous checkouts through its GetGo stores and gain traction with its Whoosh rapid-delivery network that is now available from more than 1,400 stores. 

Meanwhile, Wipro has partnered with Tesco to support its product development, supply chain transformation, test automation, Oracle transformation and infrastructure carveout for mergers and acquisitions and divestments. 

The Sunday Times reported in September that Tesco is looking to launch an Ocado-like ecommerce infrastructure that it white labels for third parties, meaning a further revenue stream could soon emerge for the grocer. 

The Very Group
(UK) 

The Very Group promoted former Sainsbury’s digital and commercial director Robbie Feather to chief executive in April 2024, kickstarting another new era for the tech-enabled Littlewoods and Very.co.uk parent company.

Very’s supply chain strategy is widely viewed as one of the UK’s best operationally and its Skygate automated warehouse in Derbyshire, which opened in 2020, allows the group to prepare orders in as little as 30 minutes. This, alongside its Wrexham legacy facilities, is the backbone to its customer proposition that includes rapid delivery, a next-day delivery order cutoff time of 10pm for some products, and the ability to scale up to manage peak trading spikes.

Most of Very’s app and website experience has been migrated to its Skyscape ecommerce platform, which the company describes as a “microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless architecture platform” enabling the business to evolve and meet changing consumer demand quicker than ever before. The new system has a dynamic content management platform that speeds up content production – for use in marketing material or website editorial pages – and provides an ability to rapidly manage the presentation of the site.

The product discovery experience has been transformed via a partnership with Constructor, which uses AI and machine learning to make the digital user experience more personalised. Foundational to the group’s tech strategy is the partnership with Amazon Web Services announced in October 2023, which it intends to use to fuel retail innovation via a dedicated generative AI innovation programme of development.

TikTok Shop
(China)

Retail disruptor TikTok Shop is part of the bevy of China-based platforms taking market share from traditional retailers in the West while also giving retailers a chance to work with it to appeal to a largely younger demographic of consumers who engage with social media platform TikTok. 

The business wants to build “the marketplace of the future”, and several changes have been made to its platform in 2024 to help it work towards that ambition. Retail Week revealed in August that TikTok Shop is increasing its seller base commission fees in the UK from 5% to 9%, as it prioritises being a platform for live commerce and shoppable content. 

A “seller missions” programme will allow UK sellers to reduce their fees if they create a “target number of TikTok live or shoppable videos”, while those wanting to sell through TikTok Shop can partner with the social platform’s creators to help them achieve these goals. 

It’s the first time that seller fees have increased since the marketplace arrived in 2021 and is a sign of TikTok investing in its infrastructure as it looks to play an influential role in online shopping’s evolution. In keeping with modern trends, TikTok Shop also launched a pre-owned luxury category in April – tapping into consumer demand for second-hand goods. 

Uniqlo
(Japan) 

From behind-the-scenes supply chain tech to in-store solutions that help drive customer convenience and make the shop experience smooth, Japanese fashion retailer Uniqlo is deploying tech holistically across its business. 

RFID is a key component to all the above, with this technology embedded into tags to ensure Uniqlo can track inventory in real-time across its operations and implement self-serve checkouts in stores so consumers can make their transactions speedily. 

In April 2023, Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing said it wanted to evolve into “an unprecedented digital consumer retailing company”. In the months since, evidence of what this might mean can be seen in new store openings, which often arrive with automated click-and-collect services and its ‘UTme!’ service allowing consumers to select and create designs for a unique printed T-shirt. 

Stores are a key focus for Uniqlo’s tech innovation strategy. Its third central London store, which opened in Oxford Street in April 2024, operates with multiple digital screens showcasing trending products and features an original Uniqlo video game dubbed ‘UT Adventure’ for shoppers to play while inside. 

Meanwhile, in September 2022, the retailer launched RE.Uniqlo Studio in its London Regent Street flagship store. It gives consumers the option to repair or upcycle garments, and the success of the initiative has led to this sustainability initiative rolling out globally. 

Walmart
(US)

A sure sign of an innovative retailer is when it starts selling its own technology capability to third parties. That is exactly what the US’ largest grocer Walmart is now doing – and it ramped up those partnerships in 2024. 

For example, through its Walmart Commerce Technologies, it is offering UK retailer Co-op Food an in-store fulfilment solution to manage its online delivery partnerships. In March, Walmart said it wanted to “strengthen retail everywhere by offering its proven tech to other businesses” when it launched AI-powered tech to help retailers keep desired products in stock and optimise driving routes. 

Walmart continues to innovate in its core operations too, and in January it bolstered its drone delivery service, now covering 75% of the Dallas–Fort Worth area in partnership with providers Wing and Zipline.  

Customer convenience is key and a new generative AI-powered search experience was introduced on Walmart’s iOS app in January 2024, allowing customers to search across categories for more relevant results using specific use cases, for example, ‘football watch party’. 

Separately, in fashion, Walmart’s Shop with Friends social commerce platform, which launched in September, uses augmented reality to enable customers to create and share virtual outfits with friends. And since May the retailer allows customers to buy real products in the metaverse for the first time, with a shoppable area within Roblox featuring a bag, water bottle and wireless headphones. 

Woolworths
(South Africa)

Having completed an overhaul of its store point-of-sale system with unified commerce platform provider Flooid in December 2021, leading sub-Saharan African retailer Woolworths continues to find new ways to evolve the consumer experience through tech. 

In 2023, the business started using First Insight’s Next-Gen Retail Tech Platform to optimise its design, merchandising and sourcing processes. Using the software, Woolworths gathers zero-party, voice-of-customer data to speed up merchandising decisions in its womenswear division where newness and relevancy are key to success. 

In January 2024, the retailer accelerated its move towards cashless interactions – particularly in its in-store cafes, where it wants to speed up and make transactions more secure by encouraging consumers to check out digitally. Meanwhile, from a supply chain perspective, Woolworths revealed in April that its food suppliers are increasingly using drones to identify plants under stress, which is allowing farmers to make data-driven decisions and conserve water resources in the name of environmental welfare. 

Woolworths’ tech-driven strategy shows no sign of slowing down any time soon, with press reports in August suggesting it had acquired the assets of collapsed e-grocery fulfilment solutions provider Takeoff Technologies, which would substantially strengthen its ecommerce infrastructure. Woolworths is also one of the five global grocery investors in the fund W23 Global. 

Żabka
(Poland) 

Drive-thrus might be a long-time part of the fabric at fast-food or coffee chains but in Poland, convenience retailer Żabka has been adapting the format for its stores to create more frictionless shopping.  Its second Drive shop opened in the country in January 2024, allowing shoppers to drive up, place their order and pick up their items from a staff-served window counter without leaving their car.   

It is just one of several new ways the retailer is looking to win customers through speedy, convenient service. It has more than 50 autonomous Nano shops powered by autonomous retail tech provider AiFi, which – along with limiting friction at the checkout – helps gather in-depth analytics about consumer shopping behaviour the retailer can use to continue to evolve its operations. 

In January, Żabka added a hot-dog-serving robot, named Robbie, to its network of Nano stores in collaboration with robotics solutions company VeloxAlpha. The robot features multiple payment methods and consumers can customise their hot dog – via Robbie – with preferred toppings. While niche, the tech serves to amplify the in-store experience and give customers more reasons to visit.

Microsoft is a key partner for Żabka in terms of crunching the data from Nano stores and supporting tech strategy in general. In July the two businesses extended a long-running partnership that will mean the retailer uses AI to support improvements in store efficiency, as well as international growth, transformation and data analytics.

Zalando
(Germany) 

Zalando announced in March it had returned to growth in 2023 after a profit slump and flatlining sales one year before, and the German marketplace’s increased use of technology is a key factor in its current upward trajectory. 

One core area of development is in logistics, where Zalando – through the November 2023 launch of B2B brand ZEOS – is enabling third-party fashion and lifestyle brands and retailers to manage their fulfilment across Europe within one unified platform.  

Pepe Jeans is already using the system to manage its European operations. ZEOS combines Zalando’s logistics capabilities with AI-based solutions, enabling brands to localise their offering by territory, manage a wider online marketplace strategy and ensure consumers ordering from several brands receive bundled orders in a single shipment. 

Elsewhere, September 2023, saw the launch of ‘Stories on Zalando’, which pushes short video content to customers and is positioned as a new way for consumers to discover fashion and culture trends. It comes after Zalando launched a ChatGPT-powered online assistant in beta mode in November 2023 – which is currently being shaped and refined with the help of customer feedback in Germany, Austria, the UK and Ireland. 

The online assistant is being developed to answer questions from customers in a true conversational style rather than one-off questions, with the technology learning from each previous question to build a rapport with the customer – and provide advice based on multiple factors including local weather conditions.

7-Eleven
(Japan)

With Japan the world’s number-one industrial robot manufacturer, according to the International Federation of Robotics, it is fitting two (Uniqlo is the other) of its leading retailers make Retail Week’s inaugural global innovators list. 

Much of 7-Eleven’s technological prowess and investment in recent times revolves around the use of AI in multiple business functions. The convenience retailer has incorporated generative AI in product development, leveraging data from store sales, customer feedback and social media to generate new concepts – and cutting the time it takes goods to come to market in the process.  

It is also using Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation’s edge AI-enabled tech at 500 of its stores to better understand the performance of in-store advertising. Via “on-sensor AI processing”, these devices were introduced in April 2024, and can automatically detect when in-store customers see digital signage and count how many people paused to view it. 

In February 2024, 7-Eleven Japan started putting plans in place to open 50 sq m stores in previously inaccessible locations, such as tower condominiums and factories, where consumers enter and pay via QR code and mobile payments without visiting a traditional till point. Manned by one member of staff responsible for stocking and managing inventory, these stores are viewed as a way to navigate a labour shortage in the country that would otherwise curtail its efforts to open stores in these locations.