How will we shop in 2020? / 4BC
The wailing and crying over the supposed death of physical retail stores seems to have been raging forever, but really it’s a recent conversation and one that is way overhyped.
Obviously there is a relatively new retail player that lives inside the digital world and starting from a zero base only a decade or so ago has taken a lot of the conversation, but put into perspective Australians last year spent $265 billion in retail stores and only 13% of that was spent online.
I have never believed that physical retail would disappear and be replaced by a totally digital online space, it just doesn’t make sense and overlooks a fundamental need we have as human beings of wanting to go to the village square, meet people, gossip, catch up, be seen, eat and buy and this innate need isn’t going to be satisfied by a totally online experience.
We have however found great purpose in online shopping – convenience, global reach, 24/7 availability, research and of course price comparison and this is where our special guest Ben Lipschitz of newly launched Shopping Ninja came into our conversation joining 4BC’s Clare Blake and myself in studio.
Ben took us through this new Australian based price comparison website and app that once downloaded sits in the background of your search engine waiting for you to shop and when you do then does its own online research bringing you back what it believes are the best prices on your white goods, liqueur or other products you’re searching for.
This is part of new set of anticpatory online tools we are using that don’t require us to remember that they’re there nor do need to activate them, but rather after we’ve installed them and given them permission to ongoing search for us, it sits in the background until we need them and then pops up do its job before disappearing again.
We then moved on to look at the future of the retail and Clare reminded me of a working exhibition I curated and built in 2009 looking at the future of retail and what technology we might expect in 2020, here’s a video segment from Channel 10’s morning program.
I love looking back at these old pieces and the foresight thinking then and in this case am proud to say that I got it right and that there is still stuff we were able to prototype and build then, that is just starting to be seen now.
As always a great segment, wonderful listener questions, terrific guests and a really good chat, so listen now (20 minutes 09 seconds) and then let me know what you see in the Future of Retail.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Looking back from 2026, what did the 2015 retail predictions get right about how we shop in 2020?
The 2015 retail predictions that proved correct for the 2020 landscape include: the continued growth of e-commerce as a share of retail spending (accelerated dramatically by COVID-19 in 2020); the growth of mobile as the primary digital commerce platform, surpassing desktop; the increasing expectation of same-day and next-day delivery as standard rather than premium; the growth of social commerce (purchasing through social media platforms) as a genuine channel rather than a curiosity; and the increasing personalisation of product recommendations through AI-driven systems. The predictions that proved overly optimistic on timeline include: widespread augmented reality try-on and fitting room deployment; seamless integration of physical and digital retail experiences; and the death of physical retail — which turned out to be more nuanced than simple decline, with some physical retail formats (experiential, community-oriented, convenience) proving more durable than predicted.
Q: What does the 2020 retail reality reveal about how technology changes shopping behaviour?
The 2020 retail reality reveals: technology changes the friction structure of purchasing rather than the fundamental motivations — convenience improvements shift volume to lower-friction channels but do not change what people want to buy or why; trust mechanisms (reviews, ratings, social proof) have become as important in digital commerce as product information — the infrastructure of trust is now inseparable from the infrastructure of commerce; and the physical and digital dimensions of retail are not substitutes but complements for most consumers — the most successful retailers are those that have integrated them rather than choosing between them. The 2020 COVID lockdown proved an accelerated natural experiment: e-commerce surged, but the recovery of physical retail once restrictions lifted demonstrated that the physical shopping experience provides something that digital cannot fully replicate.
Q: What are the retail signals most consequential for Australian businesses in 2026?
The most consequential retail signals for Australian businesses in 2026 include: the continued growth of cross-border e-commerce (particularly from Chinese platforms) intensifying price competition in categories from clothing to electronics; the increasing cost and difficulty of digital customer acquisition as platform advertising costs have risen and cookie-based targeting has been restricted; the AI-driven personalisation gap between large platforms (Amazon, Shopify ecosystem, major retailers with significant data) and small retailers who lack the data infrastructure to compete on personalisation; and the last-mile delivery economics challenge — the expectation of fast, free delivery that platform-scale logistics can support is difficult for independent retailers to match without shared logistics infrastructure.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a retail futures, consumer behaviour, or digital commerce keynote?
Contact the team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
The wailing and crying over the supposed death of physical retail stores seems to have been raging forever, but really it’s a recent conversation and one that is way overhyped. Obviously there is a relatively new retail player that lives inside the digital world and starting from.
When signals like How will we shop emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether How will we shop will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
