How today's shopper moves between channels, what earns their consideration, and where a stale brand read quietly costs revenue.
Fielded with category shoppers across store and digital channels. Modeled on the continuous shopper and brand-health research Gather runs for retail clients like Belk, Empire Today, and Quill.
Shoppers research, compare, and buy across store, site, and social in no fixed order. Channel-siloed measurement misreads the same shopper as several.
For most categories the shortlist forms online. A brand absent from that early research is competing for a spot that is already filled.
Sentiment on value and trust moved meaningfully within a single quarter. Decisions made on a year-old deck are decisions made on stale data.
Shoppers open with price, but the tiebreakers were trust in the brand and friction in the path to purchase.
The clean funnel does not describe how people actually shop. The most common pattern began with online research and ended at the shelf, with several crossings between.
Measuring each channel in isolation double-counts the same shopper and hides the handoffs. A single continuous read of the journey is the only accurate view.
For most respondents the consideration set was largely set before the store visit. The in-store moment confirmed a choice more often than it created one.
Brands that are hard to find or thin on trusted proof during early research are eliminated before the shopper is ever in reach of a shelf or a rep.
Tracked wave on wave, sentiment on value and trust did not hold steady. It moved enough within a quarter to change which decisions were correct.
An annual brand study cannot see this. Continuous tracking turns brand health from a rear-view snapshot into a live instrument merchandising and marketing can steer by.
Price was the near-universal entry point, but among comparably priced options the deciding factors were trust and a frictionless path to purchase.
Competing on price alone leaves margin on the table. The winnable ground is the trust and convenience that break a tie the price has already created.
Verbatim quotes are the evidence beneath every number. These are illustrative, in the style Gather captures on close.
I'd already decided online. Walking in was just me confirming it fit and grabbing it.
If checkout is a hassle, I'll abandon a full cart and buy the same thing somewhere easier.
Reviews from people like me matter more than any ad. That's my shortlist.
The price gets my attention. Whether I trust you decides if I actually buy.
Share whose shortlist formed before the store visit, by category
Illustrative, across sampled retail categories.
Replace channel-siloed reads with one continuous journey view. It stops double-counting and reveals the store-and-site handoffs that decide the sale.
Invest where consideration forms: findability, trusted reviews, and proof at the research stage, before the shopper is ever in store.
Move from an annual study to wave-on-wave tracking so merchandising and brand decisions run on current sentiment, not a year-old deck.
Once price is competitive, invest in the trust signals and frictionless paths that break the tie in your favor.
The Omnichannel Shopper Pulse 2026 covers how today's shopper moves between channels, what earns their consideration, and where a stale brand read quietly costs revenue. It includes an executive summary, methodology, key findings with supporting data, verbatim buyer quotes, a segment breakdown, and recommendations.
This is an illustrative sample report that demonstrates the format and depth of a Gather deliverable. The figures are illustrative and the subject is an anonymized persona. Gather produces reports in this format from real AI-moderated interview data for each client.
Gather runs AI-moderated conversational interviews at survey scale, recruits the audience from verified panels, analyzes responses on close, and turns the study into a branded report and the campaign-ready assets that come out of it, typically in days rather than a quarter.
This is the format Gather produces for retail teams: continuous shopper and brand-health research, turned into the report and the creative it informs.