Frugality-Wooing Watchlists, Trackers, Budget Coaches & Bid Tech

With many consumers’ sense of personal control eroded by financial volatility, smart brands and online platforms are enticing cash-strapped customers with new e-commerce tools. The best include agentic AI-powered price trackers, watchlists, ‘humanised AI’ financial coaches and ‘bid tech’ plug-ins, which let shoppers make an offer for full-price items – cutting down on blanket discounting.

Parameter-Setting Purchasing

Dovetailing with the price trackers and watchlists of section one, other astute brands are deploying filters that invite consumers to input their budget upfront. This bypasses frustration caused by inadvertently racking up unaffordable e-commerce carts, often resulting in e-basket abandonment. Instead, consumers are presented with a positive choice: an array of tailored-to-budget options.

Repositioning Surplus & Second Grade

Messaging that makes purchasing previous seasons’ goods, deadstock or second-grade (imperfect) products seem like a covetable, intelligent choice is enabling beauty, food and fashion brands to discount without resorting to bargain basement tactics. The anti-waste factor means many dovetail with eco-ethical behaviours, chiming with our Look Ahead 2025 theme, Cannily Curbed Consumption.

Elective Pricing Activations

Temporary choose-what-you-pay initiatives, generally focused on a subset of products, have the capacity to attract new customers and win back former fans. Using such activations to offer transparency (such as businesses’ hidden costs) can helping justify pricing and build brand-fan trust.

Beguilingly Thrifty: Revamping Value (Ad) Campaigns

Forward-thinking brands across department stores, homeware and tech are creating campaigns that evolve the ‘frugal-meets-meaningful’ approach charted in Reframing Frugality, pitching belt tightening as achievement rather than adversity. The best audaciously and inventively put price front and centre, or speak to a value-driven consumer for whom good quality is paramount.

Revisiting Rental: Tech, DIY & Gardening

While fashion rental has faltered (culminating with the April 2025 crash of CaaStle, the logistics firm powering most US fashion brands’ rentals), services for sectors including consumer electronics, DIY and gardening are finding serious favour (see Key Stats). This is due to consumers wanting to trial big ticket items, potentially purchasing them later when their finances improve.