Merchants have plenty of ways to target shoppers with promotions. Their problem is getting the right offer in front of the right customer while there is still a purchase to influence.

That gap shows up clearly in “The Smart Basket Opportunity: How Merchants Can Capture More Consumer Spending,” a July 2026 report produced by PYMNTS Intelligence in collaboration with FIS. The research, based on a survey of 60 grocery, retail and restaurant and food service merchants, finds 65% say access to data moderately, significantly or critically limits their ability to run personalized promotions.

The constraint is striking because many merchants do not consider their underlying data capabilities weak. More than half describe their access to actionable promotional data as advanced or highly advanced, while another 40% call it moderate. Yet only 27% say they can deliver one-to-one offers in real time. Another 40% remain focused on mass-market or segment-based personalization.

That leaves a gap between possessing customer data and being able to use it during an individual transaction.

The report finds another version of that disconnect in merchants’ promotional results. Personalized or targeted offers are used by 73% of merchants, making them the most commonly deployed promotional mechanism in the study. But just 48% of merchants using them rate them as their most successful mechanism. The 25-percentage-point difference between deployment and reported success is larger than for any other promotional mechanism surveyed.

The issue for merchants, then, extends beyond collecting more customer information. Their existing systems need to make that information actionable quickly enough to affect the basket.

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