Retail's 13% Online Growth Proves Your "Digital Transformation" Was Actually Just Panic
ANZ retailers spent three years hiring for channels that were already converging—and now the comp plans don't match how customers actually buy.
Online retail sales up 13% year-on-year. Physical retail up 4.7%. Every ANZ retail exec is celebrating their "omnichannel strategy" like they invented it.
Here's what actually happened: Retailers split their teams into "digital" and "store" because that's how they organized their P&Ls, not how customers shop. They hired separate SDR teams for ecommerce leads. Built different comp plans for online versus in-store AEs. Treated channels like they were different businesses.
Customers never cared about your org chart. They research online, buy in-store. They browse in-store, buy online. They return online purchases to physical locations. The "channel" isn't a customer decision—it's just where they happened to complete the transaction.
Now we're seeing the correction. That $6.5B investment returning to retail isn't going into separate digital and physical teams. It's going into unified commerce platforms that make the channel distinction irrelevant.
What this means for your comp plan:
If you're an AE getting paid on "online revenue" while your store team gets credit for "in-store purchases," your comp structure is about to get messy. That customer who researched on your website, visited the store to see the product, then ordered online for home delivery—who gets the commission?
Most retail orgs still haven't figured this out. They're running dual comp plans from 2020 that made sense when lockdowns forced clear channel separation. Now those structures are just creating internal territory battles.
The real question isn't "is retail recovering?" It's "does your territory definition still make sense when customers don't recognize channel boundaries?"
If your comp plan still treats online and offline as separate businesses, you're being paid for a customer journey that stopped existing two years ago. And when leadership finally notices that disconnect, the fix won't be adjusting commission rates—it'll be restructuring territories entirely.
Retail's recovering. Your comp plan might not survive the recovery.