Store owners use retail marketing software to acquire shoppers, build loyalty, and measure campaign success.
But while retail software spend was projected to hit $37 billion by the end of 2025, bigger tech stacks aren’t necessarily yielding better results. According to Gartner, utilization of retail marketing tech stacks fell to 49% in 2025. And only 15% of organizations hit their strategic goals and show positive return on investment (ROI) on the stack they’ve built.
So while the spend is climbing, the returns aren’t. This guide covers the essential capabilities to look for in retail marketing software. It also explains why retailers running mature, unified commerce systems grow twice as fast as the competition.
What is retail marketing software?
Retail marketing software is a collection of digital tools designed to help merchants acquire, engage, and retain customers by managing every aspect of the shopping journey, including personalized promotions and loyalty programs, automated outreach, and data collection. These software programs also help store owners and marketing professionals measure performance and track marketing ROI.
The omnichannel retail software market, valued at $15.82 billion in 2026, provides the framework for these tools. Rather than operating as isolated apps, integrated platforms connect and synchronize your operations across every customer touchpoint, including physical stores, websites, social media, and marketplaces.
Integrated systems connect your front-end point-of-sale (POS) systems and ecommerce sites with operational tools, including inventory and order management, and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
What are the types of retail marketing software?
There are several broad categories of retail marketing software:
Customer segmentation and CRM software
A CRM stores what you know about each customer, including their orders, spend, location, contact details, and purchase history. Segmentation software slices those records into groups you can market to based on their habits and characteristics.
Peppermint Products, a German design brand selling coat hangers and wardrobe hooks, discovered the limits of marketing without segmentation. They had around 50 products across multiple categories, and the team couldn’t tell which audiences to target.
So, using Shopify’s native customer segmentation, they built a segment for their B2B hotel buyers. They also split customers inside and outside Germany and created a segment for bounced and unsubscribed addresses to keep the active list clean.
“I see a huge advantage in having all my customers together in one platform,” says founder Roman Luyken.
Shopify’s customer segments are dynamic, rule-based lists built with Shopify’s query language, ShopifyQL. They combine filters such as number of orders, amount spent, last order date, and location, and they update automatically as customers move in and out of the criteria.
You can also use Sidekick, Shopify’s AI assistant,to create customer segments from a natural-language description without ShopifyQL.
POS and in-store customer capture tools
A point-of-sale system (POS) records customer transactions. It also connects purchases to customers, so other tools in the stack can use its in-store sales data.
In an interview with Practical Ecommerce, Shopify head of POS Ray Reddy says that “something as simple as buying a mattress in-store and having it shipped requires more than a basic payment app.”
The process begins at checkout. When staff add customer information, such as an email or phone number, to a purchase, Shopify POS syncs that data directly with the ecommerce back end. It also aggregates data from customers who shop both in person and online into a unified customer profile.
New EY research shows just how much that capture is worth: Store owners using Shopify POS convert 8 in 10 first-time store shoppers into known customers.
Loyalty, referral, and retention software
The goal of loyalty and retention software is to transform one-time buyers into repeat customers. The software runs the points programs, tiers, and referral mechanics that reward customers for coming back and for bringing others with them.
According to EY’s research, known customers spend up to three times as much per order as anonymous shoppers, account for up to 61% of repeat purchases, and drive 76% of in-store GMV growth.
Shopify handles part of this natively. The store credit feature lets you issue and redeem balances as a payment method. And you can run a complete loyalty program using tools from the Shopify App Store.
Take Indian luggage brand Mokobara. They built a paid membership program on Shopify, using Shopify Flow to tag loyal customers and automatically trigger their perks. Those members now generate three times the sales of non-members, and the brand’s customer retention rate has risen 30% year over year.
“If you want to treat every customer differently and offer a premium journey, Shopify’s Plus plan makes that possible at speed,” says Nikhilendra Pratap Singh Deo, senior manager of growth.
Paid acquisition, retail media, and audience software
Retailers use paid acquisition software to find and convert new customers through advertising. This includes building audiences, running campaigns across ad platforms and retail media networks, and measuring each channel’s returns.
Benchmark data from WordStream shows that in 2025, the average Google Ads cost per click (CPC) rose 12.88% year over year across all industries. It rose 33.72% in the shopping, collectibles, and gifts category. As CPC increases, precision becomes more important than securing broad reach.
To manage this, store owners can use Shopify Audiences. The tool generates prospecting, lookalike, and retargeting lists using data from across the Shopify network and then exports them directly to Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Criteo.
Analytics, attribution, and reporting software
Analytics and attribution software connects your business spend to performance outcomes by tracking your traffic, orders, and customer behavior. You can use it to assign credit to the specific channels and campaigns behind each sale.
With Shopify Analytics, you can monitor your sales, traffic, customer behavior, and marketing performance from a single dashboard. You can use its marketing reports to rank your channels by sales, sessions, conversion rate, average order value (AOV), return on ad spend (ROAS), and cost per acquisition, while easily viewing the breakdown between your first-time and returning customers.
How to choose the best retail marketing software
When Gartner evaluated 19 major digital commerce platforms for its 2025 market report, Shopify ranked highest for “Ability to Execute.” But a generic ranking shouldn’t be the final word for your business. To choose the right retail marketing features, weigh analysts’ data against your day-to-day operations.
Finding a platform that matches your business complexity requires a close look at its native capabilities. While analysts grade everything from database infrastructure to basic checkout, your retail marketing checklist may look different.
You can use this four-step evaluation process to tailor industry reports to your business’s specific needs:
- Map the rankings to your unique business profile. Generic charts reflect generic buyers. Evaluate how each software provider fits your specific industry vertical, your operational complexity, and the geographic regions where you sell.
- Weigh features by your immediate priorities. Avoid paying for capabilities you don’t need. Global technology company Manhattan Associates recommends identifying two or three critical functions—such as how the software integrates with your existing tech stack or whether it provides customers with real-time shipment visibility—and giving those features the most weight in your scoring.
- Build vendor demos around software’s weaknesses. Every software vendor profile in the Gartner report includes a list of product strengths and cautions. Typical vendor presentations focus on strengths, but Manhattan Associates advises using real scenarios from your business that play to a software product’s known weaknesses, so you can better understand risks or capability gaps.
- Match the provider’s future road map to your long-term business goals. Software commitments can last for years. Ensure the platform you choose supports your long-term goals. Consider if the provider’s future tech investments—such as AI, agentic commerce, and other automated shopping tools—align with your growth plans.
Connecting your systems to share data across channels automatically pays off. Manhattan Associates’ 2026 Global Unified Commerce Benchmark found that retailers who use unified commerce systems convert shoppers at 1.5 times the rate of those with basic tech stacks.
Retail marketing software features to prioritize
To get the most out of your software, look for capabilities that align with your daily marketing goals. Gartner’s digital commerce report outlines several “mandatory features,” or core functions every platform should have, as well as several common features you can expect:
A unified customer profile
Customer accounts are essential, and they must support strict “interoperability with customer data,” says Gartner. In other words, your customer records must connect and share seamlessly across your entire system.
Shopify answers this mandate by automatically syncing orders, contact details, and shopping behavior from your online storefront and brick-and-mortar POS into unified customer profiles. This provides a single, accurate record for every customer, which you can use to inform your marketing segments and campaigns.
Sea Bags, which sells recycled sailcloth bags, used to operate with disconnected data systems: Clover POS for their physical retail and Salesforce Commerce Cloud for ecommerce. Storing customer information in separate silos led to inconsistent and unreliable data that eventually stalled the company’s marketing efforts.
To resolve their data issues, Sea Bags consolidated their online store and 36 retail locations onto Shopify. Working from a single source of truth, the brand now captures an average of 1,200 email addresses per week at physical checkout, a 47% opt-in rate. Each contact automatically connects to a unified profile that tracks both in-store and online behavior.
“We can now track and understand our customers across both retail and online—something we couldn’t do before,” says Brian Deerwester, vice president of strategic planning and analysis.
Personalization, testing, and optimization
To maximize conversions, your platform must be able to change what shoppers see—from product recommendations to special offers—based on who they are and how they behave.
Shopify handles these foundations natively, through built-in product recommendations and Sidekick, an AI assistant that builds customer segments from plain-language prompts. For deeper, one-to-one personalization, store owners can use integration partners that plug directly into Shopify’s unified data.
Bloomreach is one of those partners. UK womenswear brand Lovall integrated Bloomreach Engagement with its Shopify store to turn their unified records into real-time, automated campaigns. Because the system tracks individual buying patterns, Lovall can, for example, identify a customer who regularly buys leggings and automatically suggest new styles in their preferred size.
These personalized flows increased Lovall’s automation revenue by 310%, raised abandoned-cart conversion by 30%, lifted average order value by 15%, and grew CRM revenue by 51%.
“And that’s a crazy stat. It doesn’t sound real. But I promise it’s real,” says Bloomreach CMO Amanda Cole.
Promotions management
An ideal retail platform is an intelligent engine for discounts and campaign offers. Instead of requiring staff to enter codes manually, the software should automatically trigger the correct discounts the moment a digital or physical cart meets your promotional rules.
Texas-based pet retailer Tomlinson’s used Shopify Functions to automate discounts for its 60-day themed marketing campaigns and annual Pet Club membership. Previously, applying those discounts on a non-Shopify POS required in-store staff to tap through several tabs to provide customers with their perks. Moving to Shopify cut the average checkout time by 56%.
“Our discounts populate automatically, which saves our team a lot of time and energy,” says Kate Knecht, owner and operator.
Read more: Win BFCM With 5 In-Store Discount Tools in Shopify POS
Channel integrations
Your platform needs to connect directly to the places your customers already spend their time. For paid ads, this means automatically syncing your store’s data with your ad platforms to reach the right shoppers.
Shopify Audiences uses an algorithm to build audience lists from millions of commerce-intent signals across the network of opted-in merchants.
Miami skin care brand L’Amarue reached a point where its customer acquisition cost matched a customer’s entire 90-day lifetime value. To reverse this trend, the brand used Shopify Audiences to target its ad campaigns, cutting customer acquisition costs (CAC) by 26.5% within three months. L’Amarue’s choice to actively apply Shopify’s targeted lists accounted for 73% of their acquisition revenue.
Unified retail commerce
Unifying your channels unlocks flexible shopping options, such as buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) or ship from store, while centralizing your customer data.
By consolidating operations on Shopify POS, store owners achieve an 8.9% equivalent uplift in annual sales, a 22% reduction in total cost of ownership, and a 20% faster implementation time, according to an independent study by EY.
Austrian beverage brand Waterdrop applied this unified approach across its website, app, and 40-plus global stores to drive its product strategy. By running a cohort analysis on that centralized data, the brand discovered that customers who purchased their peach iced tea flavor spent up to twice the average. Waterdrop used the insight to develop and launch a new raspberry variant.
“Shopify helps us understand our online and offline customers by providing us with very clear data. From this data, we can then understand what motivates our customers to purchase,” says Ieva Urbonaite, global head of ecommerce at waterdrop.
API interoperability
Interoperability is the ability of different systems to connect, communicate, and exchange data without manual effort from the user. It is essential that whatever platform you choose can share customer, product, and order data with your other business systems.
Shopify provides this data access through several application programming interfaces, or APIs:
- GraphQL Admin API. The core interface for reading and writing store data, and the required path for all new public apps.
- Storefront API. Connects headless builds, allowing custom front ends to pull live product and cart data from Shopify’s backend.
- Customer Privacy API. Standardizes shopper consent signals, ensuring themes, apps, and tracking scripts check for consent before firing.
Giva, an Indian jewelry brand with 75 stores, built custom internal inventory and product systems on top of Shopify to manage its operations. To support this architecture, the brand upgraded to Shopify Plus, partly for its higher API rate limits: 500 points per second compared to the standard 50.
By leveraging this increased capacity, Giva actively pushes roughly 20 inventory changes per second, ensuring a real-time, synchronized view of stock across its online stores and 75 retail locations.
“With Shopify, we have access to all the tools we might need to keep growing our business,” says Priyanshi Agrawal, vice president of growth and marketing.
Email, SMS, and life cycle marketing software
You can use email and SMS software to manage two primary types of communications: promotional campaigns and automated life cycles.
Automations are critical to the marketing life cycle. You can use them to send a welcome series when your customers sign up, a reminder when they abandon their cart, a follow-up after they buy, a retention message to keep active shoppers engaged, or a win-back campaign when they stop engaging.
Each message type maps to a stage in the customer’s relationship with your store. When email marketing is done well, it’s usually the highest-returning channel in the stack. In fact, Forbes puts email marketing’s average ROI at $36 for every $1 spent.
On Shopify, native email and SMS campaigns run through Shopify Messaging, which allows admins to send campaigns and automations—including templated abandoned-cart and abandoned-checkout flows—to specific customer segments.
For custom multistep automations, or any that pull in a third-party app, Shopify Flow builds the workflow from a trigger, conditions, and actions.
Retail marketing software FAQ
What software is used in retail?
A typical retail business runs several categories of software: ecommerce and point-of-sale platforms to process sales, inventory management systems to track stock across locations, customer relationship management tools to hold customer records, and marketing software for email, SMS, loyalty, and ads. Larger retail stores often add analytics and personalization layers on top.
The challenge for retail IT operations is integrating these systems so that data flows automatically between them.
What is retail ERP software?
Retail enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is a back-office system that manages core operational processes, including finance, human resources, supply chain, procurement, and inventory, on a single platform.
What is POS software for retail?
Retail POS software processes in-store transactions, including ringing up sales, taking payment, and applying discounts.
As a marketing tool, it also captures customer details at checkout and ties each purchase to a profile, which is how in-store activity feeds the rest of a retail marketing strategy.
Which retail software is best?
There’s no single best tool, only the one that works best for your retail business. The criteria that tend to matter most are integration with your existing stack, how well the software helps you track customer data, and total cost of ownership. A useful first step is to define where your back office ends and your customer-facing layer begins, then weigh the options against your specific use cases.
What is a CRM in retail?
A retail customer relationship management (CRM) system stores what a retailer knows about each customer—contact details, purchase history, customer preferences—and assigns it to segments so marketing efforts can target the right groups.
When used well, it supports customer satisfaction, increases customer lifetime value by making campaigns more relevant, and provides staff with the marketing materials and context to serve customers consistently across channels.
