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CustomerX Report 2026
Customers have been living through a cost-of-living crisis. They have responded by shifting from passive buying to intentional and contextual spending. Companies need to look outside their own sectors and channels to adjust to this new reality.
Download the report ↓About the report
To compete for a share of today’s intentional and contextual wallet, brands must master cross-sector commerce. Today’s customers prioritise value in its widest sense and quality of life, yet too many traditional direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses remain stuck selling through rigid, self-defined sectors and channels.
The RetailX CustomerX Report 2026 offers an essential evaluation of how European shoppers allocate their budgets and provides a strategic roadmap for brands to copy, collaborate and compete in a customer-focused economy.
Executive insights & takeaways
Why European shoppers facing stagnant wages and higher living costs are not cutting back equally, but allocating funds into the areas that matter most to them.
How customer purchase pathways ignore traditional categories, requiring brands to view sales through customer context.
Collecting consumer data isn’t enough in itself. What sets market leaders apart is turning behavioural insights into frictionless cross-channel experiences.
How placemaking, airports, Friday nights and wearable health tracking are transforming how leading businesses think about customer interactions.
Strategic approaches to assess the operational capabilities, tech infrastructure and checkout models required to build customer loyalty.
What’s inside
Shoppers build individual purchase journeys around specific moments, such as planning an evening out or a trip. Leading brands are breaking out of traditional retail categories to capture spend across interconnected service and product touchpoints.
Web analytics, store footprint data and behavioural tracking are giving brands deep access to consumer context. The challenge for 2026 is moving beyond passive insight to build automated yet responsive customer experiences.
From the sofa economy of Friday night streaming and food delivery to high-intent travel locations such as airports, commerce is increasingly defined by immediate customer situations rather than store locations.
Wearables, fitness applications and habit tracking are generating continuous streams of peer-benchmarked user data. This is creating dynamic new commerce contexts for tech, health and lifestyle brands.
Also inside
The RetailX CustomerX Report 2026 features our inaugural CustomerX Index (CXI) – a benchmark evaluation of more than 350 leading D2C operators trading in Europe across 15 sectors. The report features detailed case studies on market outperformers, including Amazon, PlayStation Store, Temu and easyJet.
Leading direct-to-consumer operators trading in Europe, benchmarked in the CustomerX Index.
A cross-sector evaluation rather than a view through any single category.
Market outperformers in detail: Amazon, PlayStation Store, Temu and easyJet.
Download the full report – PDF
Complete the short form to download the report.