How UK retailers reduce friction across channels

There is no real shortage of demand signals in retail. Traffic exists. Product discovery happens constantly. Customers browse on mobile, compare between devices, visit stores with an idea already half-formed in their heads, then disappear and reappear somewhere else in the journey.

For UK retailers, that gap is becoming more expensive. The Office for National Statistics reported that online sales accounted for 28.2% of total retail sales in Great Britain in February 2026, with online sales values up 11.4% year on year. At the same time, total UK footfall in 2025 fell by 0.8% compared with 2024, while the golden quarter footfall was down 2.2% year on year. In simple terms, digital demand is strong, physical visits still matter, but every store interaction has to work harder than it used to.

Most mid-market retailers are not actually battling a channel problem. They are battling a continuity problem. A customer sees one price online and another in-store. They check the stock before travelling and arrive to find it is wrong. They earn loyalty points in one place and cannot redeem them in another. They speak to store staff who cannot see their history, preferences, or even the basket they built earlier.

None of these are dramatic failures on their own. That is partly why they are so easy to live with internally. But together, they create a kind of friction tax. Small resets that chip away at conversion rates, confidence, and repeat behaviour.

And shoppers notice it. Recent research by Visualsoft and Shopify found that 33% of UK shoppers would be willing to pay more for a seamless shopping journey. Among 18 to 34-year-olds, that rises to roughly 61%. The same research found that 70% say price mismatches between online and in-store make shopping stressful, 75% say it is important to check stock online before visiting a store, and 80% say they feel happier buying from retailers that make returns simple, regardless of where they bought.

The reset problem retailers keep underestimating

A lot of retail reporting still treats channels as separate lines on a dashboard: Paid search, eCommerce conversion, store sales, etc. All useful information, but in a unified landscape, can be misleading, as customers do not experience retail that way.

They do not think in terms of channel ownership, platform architecture, or attribution models. They think in terms of momentum. Am I recognised? Can I trust the stock? Is the offer consistent across channels? Can I continue what I started earlier without having to redo it?

That is why unified retail matters more in 2026 than it did a few years ago. It is not because retailers need more software. If anything, quite a few need less of it. It matters because shoppers now move between digital and physical environments as if they are part of one journey, and they increasingly expect brands to do the same.

That expectation is already visible in behaviour. RSM UK found that 81% of shoppers regularly shop online and 83% regularly choose the in-store experience. This is not an either or market. It is a blended one.

Unified retail is more than a trend

This is where brands often get confused and frame unified commerce as a technology initiative, usually attached to platform change or a stack review, and assume it belongs to digital teams alone. In reality, it is much closer to an operating model. One that affects merchandising, retail operations, CRM, fulfilment, loyalty and customer service just as much as eCommerce.

A unified model usually comes back to a few basics:

• One view of the customer across channels

• One reliable view of stock and availability

• One approach to promotions, payments, loyalty and returns

• One journey that can continue after a store visit
  
  

This may sound obvious, but is less obvious in practice for growing retailers. They didn’t choose fragmentation as a strategy. It happened in stages. Over time, the business becomes more capable but slightly disconnected from customers, the first people to feel it.

Why this matters commercially

The wider retail backdrop is not exactly forgiving. The BRC and Opinium consumer sentiment tracker hit record lows in March 2026 for expectations around both the economy and personal finances. That matters because when consumer confidence softens, tolerance for friction usually falls with it. Customers become more selective, deliberate and slightly less generous.

A store visit, for example, should not be treated as a closed transaction. It is often an acquisition moment, a reassurance moment, or a data capture moment. Sometimes all three. If a customer tries on in-store, asks questions, shows intent and then leaves without buying, that is not the end of the opportunity.

Retailers that connect store signals to post-visit journeys, loyalty recognition, and smarter fulfilment are much more likely to turn isolated visits into more valuable experiences. Ongoing customer momentum, rather than one-off channel activity. That is the bigger shift: Less obsession with where the sale happened and more focus on whether the journey kept moving.

Where to get started

If any of this feels familiar, the next question is usually not ‘do we need more channels?’ It is ‘where are the breaks happening between the ones we already have?’ That is exactly what our new guide explores.