Global perspective on retail: online retailing July 2013

We monitor the evolution of the industry as well as global retail trends and practices to ensure our clients can best position their businesses to capitalise on future trends.

To this end we will be preparing a series of papers reviewing the state of the industry and taking a global perspective on the retail market.

This report, the first in this series, targets the growth of online retailing. We have firstly looked at the factors that are driving and constraining the growth of e-commerce in the retail market and how this growth varies globally.

We have then considered the implications of online retailing for physical retail space and looked at how shopping centre owners and managers are either adapting to or leading the new market.

The information in the report comes from a variety of sources, with market trends and characteristics based on a survey of Cushman & Wakefield offices undertaken by our global research team and internet retail sales data from Euromonitor International. We are also indebted to a number of leading shopping centre operators for their input, notably Westfield (Australia) and intu (UK), who are included as case studies.