How connected data gives retailers an edge in an unpredictable holiday season

The period between Black Friday and Boxing Day represents a chance to end the year strong and start the following year on the right footing. Sensormatic Solutions data shows that 77% of retailers who overperformed the market for their categories during 2024’s holiday rush maintained that edge over the competition throughout the first half of 2025. Retailers know that a lot is riding on the weeks ahead, and they’re eager to set every element of their approach in stone so they can enter the year’s busiest days with confidence.

However, implementing rigid plans may do more harm than good for retailers looking to set themselves apart. This year, planning to pivot will be more beneficial than planning for perfection.

Preparing for the unexpected this holiday season

If recent trends are any indication of what will motivate shoppers throughout the year’s final quarter, prices, promotions and convenience are sure to be key differentiators come November. That’s no surprise; these factors have long been among retailers’ and shoppers’ top priorities. The challenge is that all three are moving targets — what constitutes a win in any of these three areas is unique to each shopper and subject to change.

Anything and everything happening around consumers influences how they react to the brands they interact with. This includes pressures related to the global supply chain, regional preferences, the overall labor market, trending products and even social or political events. What the competition is doing can also tip the scales. Even weather patterns can impact how shoppers receive retail experiences. All of these are outside retailers’ control.

With all these variables, retailers may want to spend their final days preparing to roll with the punches rather than perfecting a strict roadmap. For many, that will mean rethinking the scope, application and potential of their data.

With connected data, retailers are unlocking visibility and agility

Connected analytics systems have become the norm in retail over the past decade, with business leaders investing billions of dollars into the technology. Using radio-frequency identification, internet of things sensors and even AI-enabled edge devices, retailers have cultivated vast records of in-store operations.

These may touch several areas, including:

• Inventory management, which can show what’s in stock, what’s on the way and what items are most at risk of being stolen or broken.
• Shopper behavior, which can tip retailers off to how visitors interact with their products, associates and in-store displays. Some systems can even “re-ID” repeat visitors and differentiate between employees and shoppers.
• Sales trends, which can show what’s selling and what isn’t in real time.
• Buy online, pick up in-store and other click-and-collect programs, which can reveal bottlenecks in processes, quantify wait times and track use of promotions.

However, much of this data has been siloed in function-specific tech stacks, preventing retailers from seeing the full picture. By integrating and analyzing this data, retailers can identify tactics that enhance processes beyond each zone to guide improvements in labor allocation, customer experience, shrink mitigation and more. These efforts have driven significant operational enhancements independently, but true operational agility demands context from much earlier in the supply chain.

When retailers extend their RFID-driven, item-level inventory visibility from the source to the store, they gain a critical ability: to combine and cross-reference nuggets of information from different zones, departments and timeframes. Just as connecting the dots on the sales floor revolutionized how retailers think about their practices, connecting manufacturing and transportation data with everything else can reveal once-hidden truths that highlight potential complications and enable quick action. In short, it enables the level of agility retailers need to keep up with ever-changing variables.

This level of visibility can also change how retailers think about and respond to the very challenges they face. For example, shrink is one of the industry’s most persistent foes, but few retailers have a handle on the true scale of its impact, even in today’s connected world. Many leaders attribute growing shrinkage to organized retail crime, but end-to-end insight often shows that theft is just one tiny piece of the puzzle.

A retailer’s total losses are just as often driven by simple accidents, poor planning, insufficient training and any number of other things. Regardless of the root cause, missing items turn into incorrect counts, unfulfilled pick-up orders, longer wait times and — over time — higher prices to account for the shortfall. Gaining this kind of context inevitably shifts how teams prioritize projects, enabling them to make decisions about next steps more quickly and confidently. That’s just what retailers need as they head into the holiday season.

Betting on flexibility ahead of holiday uncertainty

The holiday rush is a high-stakes competition for retailers, and this year will be no different — but there’s still time to prepare. Retailers cannot possibly know what exactly the season will hold, but they can spend that time getting to know their business more deeply. Developing this understanding is the first step toward the flexibility necessary to balance customer wants and business needs during high-traffic, highly uncertain times.

It’s a daunting task ahead of an already challenging season, but retailers won’t have to look far for a solution. The answer is already in their operations and waiting to be explored.

Sponsored by Sensormatic Solutions