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12 min read

Retail’s 6 Biggest Challenges—and the Best Way to Solve Them

Global HR

Employer of record

Contractor management

Immigration

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Author

Jemima Owen-Jones

Published

September 27, 2024

Last Update

February 13, 2025

Table of Contents

1. Talent shortages

2. Disjointed onboarding

3. Communication breakdown

4. Team disengagement

5. Data security risks

6. Rising inflation and market fluctuations

Tackle retail industry challenges with Deel

Key takeaways
  1. Retailers face persistent challenges, including high employee turnover, evolving consumer expectations, outdated HR systems, and rising operational costs. These issues negatively impact workforce stability, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance.
  2. To overcome these challenges, retailers must streamline workforce management, improve retail employee engagement, and ensure compliance with labor laws. Solutions like global hiring, automated payroll, optimized onboarding, and strong internal communication strategies can enhance operational efficiency.
  3. Deel simplifies hiring, onboarding, compliance, and payroll through a single, secure platform. With 110+ owned entities, AI-powered compliance tools, and seamless integrations, Deel helps retailers scale their workforce, reduce administrative burdens, and maintain compliance across global markets.

If you’re searching for solutions to streamline workforce management and compliance in the fast-evolving retail industry, you’re not alone. Retail store managers constantly grapple with challenges like high employee turnover, outdated HR systems, and escalating operational costs that ultimately affect customer satisfaction.

With an extensive global presence and years of experience, Deel has mastered the art of transforming these complex HR, payroll, and compliance challenges into opportunities for growth.

This article explores how partnering with Deel can revolutionize your retail operations by enhancing hiring, onboarding, team communication, engagement, security, and technology integration. The outcome is a resilient, compliant, and engaged workforce that drives efficiency and enhances overall organizational performance.

1. Talent shortages

Retail businesses depend on their employees to provide excellent customer service. However, hiring experienced staff with the necessary skills can take time and effort.

What’s more challenging in a competitive job market is attracting and retaining them. Annual turnover among frontline retail workers has been at least 60%. The trend is due to low job satisfaction and unstable work schedules.

To overcome talent shortages, use Deel EOR. This employment model enables companies to legally hire employees from any country without setting up an entity in that country. Therefore, Deel is helpful if you’re struggling to find talent locally, as you can broaden your search to talent pools in other countries.

Discover how top staffing firm Flexhive unlocked new growth with Deel.

With Deel, Flexhive has successfully hired over 130 employees in new geographies in less than a year. The streamlined end-to-end process and employee management tools give the Flexhive team the ability to reduce the amount of time spent on hiring and onboarding processes by up to 80%.

Deel Contractor of Record
Minimize misclassification risk
Guard your business from misclassification risks with 100% protection. Deel Contractor of Record helps you grow your team globally with extra peace of mind.

Embrace the contingent workforce

With Deel’s flexible hiring solutions, you can also hire contract workers or freelancers, which is crucial for scaling the workforce up or down based on fluctuating demand without the long-term commitments of full-time employees.

Deel’s advanced AI-powered Compliance Hub ensures accurate worker classification, reducing the risk of employees being wrongly classified as independent contractors.

Discover how Tiqets hires compliantly around the world with Deel Contractor of Record.

If it weren’t for Deel Contractor of Record, we would have not been able to hire team members with the security and compliance level we wanted, in those countries.

Maartje Koopman,

Head of People and Culture at Tiqets

Deel Contractor
Onboard, manage and pay international contractors compliantly
Hiring talent abroad? Get with the market leader in contractor management. Deel automates HR admin, mitigates misclassification risk, and ensures on-time payments in 150+ countries—all with unrivaled compliance and payment flexibility.

Support worker visas and relocations

If you want to relocate a worker to your headquarters or hire a foreign worker who doesn’t have the necessary work authorization to operate in a particular country, Deel also has Deel Immigration, a service to help you procure visas and work permits for workers.

Discover how Form3 grew its workforce by 20% in one year with Deel.

Deel gives us the peace of mind of knowing that in these visa situations, the employee will get the support they need, says Schofield.

Leanne Schofield,

Head of People at Form3

Deel Immigration
Get worldwide visas without the legwork
Hire and retain the best global talent, while smoothing out the usual visa hurdles. Deel’s in-house immigration support handles the entire visa process, enabling employees to work from 50+ countries—and counting.

2. Disjointed onboarding

When onboarding new employees, workflow disruptions are expected. Not only do they need to learn about your products and company processes, but it is also during this time that they form a lasting impression of the company they’ve joined. However, most retailers don’t understand the importance of investing in onboarding and even the ones that do fail to follow best practices.

Onboarding becomes more complex and challenging compliance-wise when you hire internationally across different time zones.

Moreover, HR teams often lack the time and resources to provide new employees with the onboarding experience they deserve. This leads to dissatisfaction, forcing the reporting manager to do the work, but they may not have enough time or knowledge to provide a consistent experience for everyone.

Deel makes onboarding more efficient. The suite of features helps streamline and elevate your onboarding process. Here’s how Deel can help:

  • Deel workspaces: Provide your global team with access to coworking spaces. When creating employee contracts for new hires, simply request a WeWork all-access monthly membership for them so they have a conducive work environment wherever they reside
  • Create customizable onboarding workflows: With the Workflow Builder, you can create customized workflows to automate repetitive tasks and communication throughout your organization. This includes onboarding emails, training modules, and checklists for new hires, ensuring a personalized onboarding experience
  • Connect Deel with your favorite tools: Deel integrates with your existing software to provide a better employee experience. For example, Deel has an onboarding plugin for Slack that allows new hires to access onboarding materials and participate in activities. Even direct supervisors can use the Slack dashboard to monitor the onboarding process and generate checklists tailored to the worker’s location and status
  • Automate background checks: Depending on company policy and country-specific laws, employers may need to verify their new hires’ identity using government-issued documents and check employment history, educational qualifications, criminal record, address, references, and social media (if relevant). This entire process is time-consuming if the employee you hired is from another country. You can automate this process with Deel and get employee background checks with faster results
  • Simplify equipment management: When you hire an international worker, sending equipment can be a complex task. It involves dealing with shipping logistics, handling customs processes, and ensuring the right equipment is delivered on time to minimize downtime for employees. That’s where Deel IT comes in to simplify the process of providing equipment to new hires.
    From your Deel dashboard, you can send an agreement to provide and manage your team’s equipment, covering all your business bases. This feature allows you to send, track, and equip your team compliantly with the essential tools they need to do their best work.
    If you need more help providing equipment, you can check out this handy tutorial.
  • Streamline benefit enrollment: Offering your new hire the right local benefits is essential to staying competitive and compliant. If you hire with Deel, we’ll help you navigate the statutory, common, and competitive benefits in each market so you offer a competitive benefits package every time
  • Provide desirable perks: Today’s employees are looking for more than just salaries. They want to feel their employer values them, so update your benefits package to enhance the onboarding experience of new hires. With Deel perks, Deel Card, and Deel Advance, you can help them have the best work-life:
    • Deel Perks offers discounts and vouchers for personal and professional development, travel, insurance and healthcare, mental well-being, and more.
    • Deel Card works like a debit card. It allows your contractors to receive their earnings in a stable currency (USD), making it easier for them to manage finances, especially when working internationally.
    • Deel Advance lets your workers access funds when needed without the hassle of credit checks or high interest rates. They can get up to $50 without any fees, making managing unexpected expenses easier. Anything over this amount is paid back with a small fixed fee.

We have more to offer, so visit your Deel profile to see the complete list of perks available in your location.

Bonus tip: Making sure you have everything ready for your new employee on their first day can be stressful. Here’s an onboarding checklist for new hires to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

Discover how Finder cuts onboarding time in half and reduces HR admin by 20% with Deel.

Having Deel’s team handle compliance and statutory requirements frees up my time to focus on providing better workplace experiences, like onboarding to building the capabilities of our workforce,

Isaiah James Peralta,

Head of Distributed Services

Deel's Built-In HRIS
Manage your global workforce compliantly
Deel's included HRIS is custom-built for your entire team, so you can easily manage HR for workers compliantly in 150+ countries. Unify reporting, automate HR admin, and supercharge your HR stack with our streamlined platform.

3. Communication breakdown

We all know effective communication is crucial for any company’s success. It influences employee productivity, motivation, and overall engagement. Surprisingly, employees spend a lot of time each day searching for the information they need to perform their jobs.

Moreover, in sectors like retail, managing internal communication can be particularly challenging. Employees often work part-time, have varying schedules, and are located in different places. This makes it challenging to share important information with everyone at the right time, leading to confusion.

That’s where Deel plugins come in, helping you centralize team communication and knowledge sharing directly into Slack and reducing the need to switch between multiple platforms. Key plugins include:

  • 1-on-1s: Facilitates structured weekly check-ins, allowing preparation, execution, and tracking of one-on-one meetings within Slack
  • Referrals: Streamlines the employee referral process, enabling team members to submit and track referrals easily
  • Connections: Strengthens team culture by fostering connections through interest-based groups, conversation starters, and meet-up roulettes
  • Pulse Surveys: Allows the creation and distribution of quick surveys to gauge employee engagement and gather feedback
  • PTO: Simplifies time-off management by enabling employees to request and monitor paid time off directly in Slack
  • Org Charts: Provides visual organizational charts to help team members understand company structure and reporting lines
  • Announcements: Enables targeted, private Slack announcements with engagement metrics to track who has viewed the updates
  • Kudos: Allows team members to recognize and appreciate each other’s contributions directly within Slack

Discover how ThirstySprout saves 7 to 10 hours per hire with Deel.

As most of our work gets done in Slack, the Slack integration and its ease of use are great. Teams don't have to log out and go to the HRIS to type in their stuff now. They just Slack it, and all of a sudden, everything is documented and synced,

David Stepania,

Founder at ThirstySprout

HR Plugins
Revolutionize HR with Integrated Slack Plugins
Empower your team with an integrated suite of Slack HR plugins that manage PTO, kudos, referrals, and org charts, streamlining workflows and enhancing connections.

4. Team disengagement

Retail’s quit rate is 70% higher than that of other industries, and employee disengagement is a big concern. Disengaged employees can negatively impact customer experience. One negative experience can damage brand loyalty and growth, especially in a market where rivals are constantly willing to step in and take advantage of the void.

Your organization must commit to your team’s development so that employees feel more invested in their roles. This, in turn, should have a positive impact on their productivity and longevity with your organization.

To gauge employee engagement, you can use Deel Engage, an AI-powered people suite where you can manage development, performance, and training programs in one place.

With Deel Engage, retail companies can:

  • Provide thorough feedback, from 360° evaluations to custom processes, to guarantee bias-free performance appraisals and leverage OKRs and other goals for constant team advancement
  • Link individual goals and competencies to performance reviews
  • Identify skills gaps and assign targeted training courses
  • Give employees a clear path forward with competency-based career progression frameworks to promote role clarity and motivation

These tools help automate performance review cycles and create engaging employee training, enhancing the employee experience. They also provide managers and the HR team with more accessible and accurate data.

Discover how Freeletics upskills leaders and saves costs with Deel Engage.

Leaders drive our organization. With Deel Engage, we’ve introduced innovative learning tools to enhance their effectiveness and success.

Daniel Sobhani,

CEO, Freeletics

Deel Engage
Build high-performing teams with half the work
Retain top talent and foster a culture of high performance with our AI-powered people suite to manage development, performance, and training programs from one single place.

5. Data security risks

According to the 2022 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average retail data breach cost is $3.28 million. Data breaches cause retailers to suffer financially and lose customers’ trust in their ability to secure their data.

Deel security addresses this challenge by adhering to the highest data security and risk management standards.

Deel has SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, and GDPR certifications, indicating our commitment to the highest global data security and privacy protection standards.

  • SOC (SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3) certifications confirm that Deel's financial controls, data protection processes, and security procedures meet rigorous standards set by the AICPA
  • Deel has established a comprehensive information security management system through ISO 27001 certification. This manages data security risks according to international best practices
  • Deel complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring high levels of personal data protection

Beyond certification, Deel offers role-based access controls (RBAC) to ensure employees only see the customer data needed for their jobs.

You can further enhance security with single sign-on (SSO), allowing users to log in with one password while ensuring that only approved devices can access sensitive data.

Most data breaches happen within businesses due to a lack of awareness and proper training. At Deel, we focus on security and privacy training.

Deel offers training resources through Albert, a Slack plugin that provides short courses on phishing, ransomware, and mobile security. These lessons are only five minutes long, making them easily fit into busy schedules.

Out of all the tool implementations I’ve done, Deel has been the best in terms of consultancy, support, and partnership.

Caroline Randazzo,

Head of Human Resources and Recruitment at Aquatic

Global Compliance
Automate your compliance needs
Hire anywhere without worrying about local laws, complex tax systems, or managing international payroll. Focus on finding the perfect match for your team, we’ll take care of the rest.

6. Rising inflation and market fluctuations

Rising prices impact retail businesses in many ways. Some common challenges are increasing costs for labor, rent, utilities, and raw materials. There is also a decline in consumer spending, particularly on discretionary items, which are recurring issues.

Rising inflation raises the cost of borrowing money, making it harder for retailers to invest in future growth. One way to face this challenge is to raise product prices, but doing so can jeopardize customer loyalty programs.

Instead of stressing over rising inflation and market fluctuations, Deel can help you do more with less. The platform consolidates HR functions into a single system and automates payroll and payment processing, minimizing manual tasks and errors and allowing you to allocate resources more effectively during inflationary periods.

Tackle retail industry challenges with Deel

Retailers face many challenges every day. However, handling them confidently and using the right tools can help you stay a step ahead of competitors.

Deel for us is dealing with the entire complexity of our HR, contracts, and payments in a very efficient and fast manner.

Daniel Aksioutine,

COO at DivBrands

Deel is the ultimate tool for retailers to transform these common challenges into growth opportunities. With Deel, you can:

  • Hire and onboard top talent across the globe. With over 110+ directly owned entities, you can easily engage with skilled professionals
  • Manage your people, payroll, compliance, and performance all in one place
  • Pay any type of worker in 100+ countries via a single platform in just a few clicks
  • Ensure local tax and labor law adherence to minimize legal risks
  • Integrate Deel’s platform with your existing tools to meet your team’s needs
  • Protect sensitive customer data to safeguard information and build trust
  • Run meaningful 360-degree performance reviews and goals management to get a more complete picture of employee performance

Learn more about Deel for retail, or book a 30-minute demo with our experts today to learn how Deel can address the challenges your retail business is facing.

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About the author

Jemima is a nomadic writer, journalist, and digital marketer with a decade of experience crafting compelling B2B content for a global audience. She is a strong advocate for equal opportunities and is dedicated to shaping the future of work. At Deel, she specializes in thought-leadership content covering global mobility, cross-border compliance, and workplace culture topics.

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