BACKIn 2025, retailers are facing growing challenges, from the cost-of-living crisis to rapidly evolving consumer expectations. Shoppers now demand seamless experiences, fast response times, and personalised interactions, especially during peak shopping seasons.
To stay competitive, outsourcing has become a powerful strategy, allowing retailers to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction. By leveraging external expertise for tasks like customer support, order management, and logistics, businesses can focus on core operations while ensuring a smooth and engaging shopping experience.
In this blog, we’ll explore the key challenges retailers face and how outsourcing can help overcome them, enhance efficiency, and strengthen customer loyalty for long-term success.
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Global retail and eCommerce outlook: Key numbers for 2025 and ahead
After navigating a retail downturn in mid-2024, retailers are poised for a stronger year ahead. Encouraging retail trade data and improving consumer sentiment signal a long-awaited recovery, setting the stage for sustained growth.
eCommerce continues to dominate, with global online sales projected to reach $6.56 trillion in 2025, adding another $500 billion in 2026 to hit $7.06 trillion. By 2027, online sales revenue is expected to climb to $7.57 trillion, surpassing the $8 trillion milestone by 2028.
Between 2022 and 2028, global eCommerce sales are forecasted to grow by nearly $3 trillion, marking a 57.7% increase and an average annual growth rate of 7.6%. These numbers present a major opportunity for retailers to embrace digital transformation, and leverage outsourcing solutions to optimise their strategies for long-term success.
Key challenges in the retail industry
The retail industry is evolving faster than ever, driven by shifting consumer behaviours and unexpected disruptions. To stay competitive in 2025, retailers must navigate key challenges and adapt swiftly. Here are four critical obstacles and how to overcome them.
1. Local vs. global: The fierce competition in eCommerce
In 2025, retailers will face intense competition from both local and global eCommerce platform giants like Amazon and Alibaba, as well as emerging regional marketplaces. These industry leaders are leveraging aggressive pricing, personalised shopping experiences, and rapid delivery to dominate market share, making it increasingly difficult for smaller retailers to compete.
Price wars remain a major challenge, forcing businesses to either lower prices or find alternative ways to add value. Additionally, standing out in a saturated digital landscape requires innovative marketing strategies, strong brand differentiation, and the ability to meet rising customer expectations. With the growing influence of social commerce on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, retailers must continuously adapt to shifting trends, optimise their online presence, and enhance customer loyalty to stay competitive.
2. Inventory management and supply chain disruptions
Balancing inventory levels is a constant challenge for retailers. Hence, retailers must strike a delicate balance when managing inventory, because stockouts lead to missed sales opportunities, while overstocking increases holding costs and markdown risks. To optimise stock levels, businesses are turning to real-time tracking, and demand forecasting reducing excess stock while ensuring products remain available.
At the same time, supply chain disruptions, including shipping delays, rising material costs, and supplier instability, continue to pose challenges. To maintain profitability and operational efficiency, retailers must diversify suppliers, invest in advanced tracking technology, and implement contingency plans to navigate unpredictable market conditions.
3. Rising costs in retail: shipping, labour, and logistics
In 2025, retailers are under growing financial pressure as rising shipping rates, labour shortages, and escalating operational costs threaten profitability. Supply chain disruptions continue to cause unpredictable delays and soaring freight expenses while fluctuating fuel prices add further strain on logistics budgets.
At the same time, a shrinking workforce in warehousing and delivery is making logistics operations increasingly costly. While automation and logistics software, such as real-time tracking and route optimisation can enhance efficiency and reduce expenses, these solutions require significant upfront investment.
To remain competitive, retailers must streamline logistics, embrace automation, and prioritise regional markets, all while maintaining operational efficiency and delivering seamless customer experiences.
4. Staffing shortages
Successful operations are also reliant on a skilled, customer-focused workforce, but staffing shortages are making it increasingly difficult to maintain service levels. High turnover roles remain a challenge, with over one million workers needed to fill industry gaps. 74% of retailers expect shortages in customer-facing positions, leading to longer wait times, reduced service quality, and lost sales.
Recruitment is also becoming more difficult, with 83% of retailers struggling to find skilled workers. As digital solutions like AI-powered recommendations, self-checkouts, and chatbots reshape retail, many employees lack the technical expertise to support these innovations.
To stay competitive, retailer businesses must invest in better training, automation, and retention strategies to maintain smooth operations and deliver a seamless customer experience.
How outsourcing addresses retail pain points
The retail industry is facing mounting challenges, from rising operational costs and supply chain disruptions to staffing shortages and intense eCommerce competition. As businesses struggle to maintain efficiency and profitability, outsourcing has emerged as a strategic solution to overcome these obstacles. To overcome these challenges, retailers can turn to outsourcing solutions to streamline workforce management, enhance employee engagement, and ensure compliance with labour laws.
1. Optimised cost efficiency
Outsourcing helps retailers cut labour and operational costs, with businesses saving from 30-70% on wages by tapping into global talent. This allows companies to reinvest in growth and innovation without compromising efficiency.
2. Agile and scalable operations
Retail demand fluctuates, especially during peak seasons. Outsourcing enables businesses to scale operations up or down seamlessly, ensuring they stay agile while maintaining service quality.
Outsourcing retail and eCommerce functions like customer support, sales support, IT services, and digital marketing enables businesses to streamline operations and embrace new technologies without significant in-house investment.
3. Enhanced customer support
Outsourcing improves customer support by offering 24/7 service and multilingual assistance, crucial for global eCommerce. Advanced solutions like live chat and social media support further enhance engagement and satisfaction.
In a highly competitive and digital retail landscape, outsourcing empowers businesses to optimise costs, improve customer experiences, and focus on long-term growth.
How Accent Group scaled tech operations with outsourcing
Accent Group’s success with Away Digital Teams highlights how strategic outsourcing can enhance efficiency, scalability, and cultural alignment. Facing local hiring challenges and the need to expand its tech capabilities, Accent Group turned to Away Digital Teams to build a high-performing offshore unit in Vietnam.
Through a rigorous recruitment process, Away Digital Teams assembled a dedicated team of nine skilled tech professionals, including Full Stack Developers, QA Engineers, Front-End and Back-End Developers, and DevOps Engineers. This offshore team became part of a larger 40-person workforce, tailored to meet Accent Group’s specific operational needs.
Seamless integration was key. Structured onboarding, consistent communication protocols, and close collaboration with the Australian team ensured that the offshore professionals worked in sync with Accent Group’s customer-focused culture.
The results were transformative:
- Up to 50% cost savings compared to local hiring
- Enhanced tech delivery efficiency
- A scalable offshore model supporting long-term growth
This case study demonstrates that outsourcing, when done right, is more than just cost-cutting – it’s a strategic move that strengthens operations and accelerates business success.
In today’s fast-evolving retail and eCommerce landscape, outsourcing is no longer just about reducing costs, it’s about strategic growth, agility, and innovation. With the right partner, retailer businesses can scale efficiently, enhance operations, and stay ahead of the competition. Discover Outsourcing 2.0, our next-level approach to building high-performing teams that drive real results.