‼️EXCLUSIVE 👀 FIRST LOOK 👀: Deloitte Digital’s "Bridging the commerce divide" with Bobby Stephens & Apurva Pangam
Retailgentic has it first - come explore the new consumer and merchant report - there's a big gap between where brands think they are and what consumers say - let's dig into it!
We have a Special Summer Treat for you today! Bobby Stephens and Apurva Pangam from Deloitte Digital are on the pod to bring the Retailgentic audience an exclusive first look at Deloitte Digital’s 2026 B2C Commerce Research report called: “Bridging the divide” t’s a double-sided study pairing 500+ merchant leaders with 1,000+ consumers, with two years of trend lines behind it, and the throughline is a gap: brands think they’re doing far better than their customers do. Bobby and AP walk through where consumers and merchants align, where they badly diverge, and what the leaders are doing that everyone else isn’t. You’re getting it first.
Highlights of the Report
To me the punch line to the whole thing - this matters - if merchants lean into ACO, you are rewarded financially with 60% faster growth, and 2X revenue beats according to the Deloitte data→
Where should you focus?
The above ‘perception gap’ graphic really packs a punch and it’s got a ton of data to peel the onion on. One great thing about the underlying survey data is it has been running annually for 3+ years so can track not only the current perception gap, but changes over time -that’s the black box.
The gaps from largest to lowest between merchant perception (the left bar) and consumer perception (the right bar):
19% delta - Accurate Site Search - My take here is Answer Engines have elevated the search experience to get answers faster with less friction. Brands are not keeping up, and in fact falling behind.
17% - Helpful Customer Service - Again, for answer engines, ‘time to resolution’ is dropping and there’s less friction - memory and features
16% - Clear Availability of Inventory - Nothing’s more frustrating than getting excited about an item to later find it’s out of stock.
15% - Proactive delivery updates - When am I getting my new thing?!
13% - Clear pricing - On this part of the site you said $X and now it’s $Y (where Y is always » X - wth?!
That’s one chart, but it really is quite interesting to see see both sides of the coin.
I’m a bit of a broken record here, but underlying site search, inventory, delivery times, clear pricing - it all comes back to your product catalog - we are chronically underinvesting here as an industry and Agentic Commerce exposed it and the obvious holes are growing.
To help us unpack all the report, Bobby and Apurva walk us through the data in greater details. Let’s go into their background now→
About Bobby and Apurva
Bobby is Head of US Retail & CPG at Deloitte Digital His path is refreshingly non-linear: he started on the retail buying side doing men’s fashion in a department store, got tapped as “the young guy” to help launch the company’s website, and moved onto the technology side designing and building early e-commerce sites. Around 2012 he left Deloitte, raised venture money, and ran a footwear startup in Chicago for about four years before selling it, taking a year off, and returning to Deloitte in ~2016. He’s led the US retail and CPG practice ever since.
Apurva “AP” is Commerce Practice Lead & Principal at Deloitte Digital. He’s been at Deloitte roughly 20 years, focused the whole way through on customer experience, marketing, and commerce, working both B2C and B2B clients and driving large-scale digital transformations globally.
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
This is a report deep dive, and Deloitte gave Retailgentic the exclusive first look at brand-new research: hundreds of senior merchant leaders and a thousand-plus recent online shoppers, both sides of the counter, with trend data from two years back layered in. The result is a map of where brands and consumers see the same picture and where they see completely different ones. And the data is fresh, fielded this spring, analyzed over the last month, unveiled here.
They describe exactly what those leaders do differently, and why it pays off. You want the edge? This is it.
Highlights
The basics are the new battleground: Accurate search, real inventory visibility, clear delivery dates, easy returns are no longer differentiators, just expected. And a majority of consumers say brands haven’t improved on them in two years.
The perception gap: Only 16–18% of consumers rate brands “excellent,” while brands rate themselves in the low-to-mid 30s, a false-confidence gap that’s driving under-investment where it matters.
57 definitions of personalization: the “golden term” has “probably 57 different definitions”, but ~70% of consumers say personalized experiences genuinely matter. Get it wrong and you hurt trust more than you help.
14–15 loyalty programs: 99% of surveyed brands offer one and 80% of customers belong to more than one, the average U.S. consumer is a member of 14–15 but active in only four or five. “You are fighting for head space.”
The cashback gap: Over half of consumers say cashback is the loyalty benefit they’d value most but only 14% of brands offer it. Customers want financial value and simplicity; brands keep adding tiers and complexity.
The leaders’ payoff: Consumers spend 34% more with the brands that nail the basics + personalization + sticky loyalty, 57% will try a new product from them, and 55% will recommend them to family and friends.
Efficiency over experience: The two top-reported benefits merchants cite from AI aren’t customer-facing at all, they’re better decision-making and greater efficiency. Brands are getting their own house in order first.
Machine-readable product data: Product content is still “teeny tiny” and over-optimized for the keyword era, even as LLMs collapse the old 20-tabs-and-a-spreadsheet decision into one answer. If the data isn’t there, the agent won’t infer it, it just gives what’s available.
Connecting the dots: Data, loyalty, and AI in isolation aren’t enough; the winners execute across all three and make deliberate choices about the purpose of the store vs. the site vs. the app vs. the LLM.
Fresh data, both sides of the counter, and a clear-eyed read on the gap between what brands think they’re delivering and what shoppers actually feel. Bobby and AP brought the goods. Enjoy the conversation! 👇
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Check out the report! → https://www.deloittedigital.com/us/en/insights/research/b2c-commerce-experiences.html
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