The Retail CDP RFP Guide: How to Choose a Customer Data Platform for Your Retail Brand
Retail generates more customer data than nearly any other industry, but fragmented systems mean most of it never gets used the way it should. Loyalty profiles are duplicated. In-store purchases are invisible to digital campaigns. Retail media audiences lack the identity confidence advertisers demand. And AI initiatives stall because the data underneath them isn't trusted.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) built for retail solves these problems by unifying shopper data across POS, ecommerce, loyalty, mobile, and every other system where your data lives. It creates the trusted foundation that powers personalization, retention, media monetization, and the AI-driven decisions that increasingly separate leading retailers from the rest.
But not every CDP is built for retail complexity. This guide gives you a practical framework for finding the one that is.
What's inside
This guide is built for the cross-functional teams that drive CDP decisions at enterprise retailers, from marketing and loyalty to data, engineering, and retail media. Inside you'll find:
A retail-specific evaluation framework organized around the four outcomes that matter most: AI-ready data foundation, growth, loyalty, and profit and monetization
Table stakes vs. next level capability benchmarks for each area, so you can distinguish baseline vendors from leaders
Ready-to-use RFP questions that test identity resolution across in-store and online channels, AI-powered segmentation and journey creation, real-time activation, retail media audience quality, and privacy compliance across 19+ US state privacy laws
A crawl/walk/run maturity model for retail use cases, from customer suppression and welcome series to real-time personalization and audience monetization
Guidance on which sections matter most for each buyer persona: CMO, CDO, CTO, Director of Martech, and VP of Retail Media
Download the guide to start evaluating CDPs with the specificity that retail requires.