A view from the GCC floor on why merchandising, not just tech, is fast becoming the real prize for retailers building capability out of India.
Walk into any large retailer’s India centre today and the conversation sounds nothing like it did five years ago. Engineers are still there. Data teams have grown. The platform work continues. But the questions being asked in the room have shifted. Fewer people ask, “can you build this?” More are asking, “what should we actually be doing about it?” That single shift, from doing to defining, is what makes this moment interesting for retail GCCs, and it is why merchandising, of all functions, is the one quietly moving next.
For a long time, retail global capability centers were treated as engineering shops with a retail logo on the door. The work was real, the platforms were serious, but the commercial heart of retail (buying, planning, pricing, assortment, promotions) stayed close to head office. That separation made sense when the head office had all the context and the GCC had all the throughput. It makes far less sense today. As of FY2026, India hosts 2,117 GCCs generating USD 98.4 billion in market revenue, employing 2.36 million professionals, with more than 506 Forbes Global 2000 companies operating out of the country. The data that drives merchandising decisions already lives in warehouses and lakehouses that GCC teams own end to end.
Why Are Retail GCCs Moving Into Merchandising Now?
Retail merchandising has always been the part of retail that felt too instinctive to move. Buyers had relationships. Planners had gut feel. And the argument was that this kind of judgement could not sit ten time zones away. That argument is getting harder to make with every quarter.
Read More: How AI Is Reshaping The Best Software For Payroll Management
A few things have changed at the same time.
First, the raw material of merchandising is now data. Assortment breadth, size curves, price ladders, promo lift, competitive shelf response, none of these get decided on instinct alone anymore. They get decided with retail data analytics that a GCC team is already producing every day. When the analysis happens in Gurugram and the decision happens in Minneapolis or London, a handoff gap opens up, and value quietly leaks out of that gap. Analysts at Polestar Analytics have written about the same insight-to-decision architecture problem on the RGM side, and merchandising is heading toward the exact same friction point.
Second, retail cycles have compressed. A markdown decision that used to be weekly is now daily. A pricing response that used to be seasonal is now event-driven. The old model, where the GCC produced a dashboard and the head office made the call, cannot keep up with that cadence. Somebody closer to the data needs to hold the pen.
Third, and this is the part that is easy to miss, the talent equation has flipped. AI workforce penetration inside retail GCCs has more than doubled from 2.1% in 2022 to 4.8% in 2025, and is forecast to hit 7.2% in 2026. The top retail GCCs are no longer hiring only for technical depth. They are hiring for people who can connect a supply chain signal to a merchandising choice, read a category the way a buyer reads it, and hold a conversation with a business leader without needing a translator in the middle. That is a merchant mindset, and it is being built inside GCCs, not just inherited from head office.
Which Retail Merchandising Capabilities Are Moving to GCCs?
The mistake most retailers make is to treat this as a lift-and-shift conversation. It is not. What is moving is not a job description, it is a decision surface.
A few areas are already showing up on the GCC side of the line.
Assortment and space planning. GCC-based planners are running the granular work: cluster definitions, size profiling, planogram optimisation, localisation logic. According to EY, India is now a global hub for GCCs in retail and CPG, with over 70 companies employing more than 85,000 professionals, and over 25 new centres likely in the next two to three years, most of them mandated to own precisely this kind of work.
Price and promo analytics.Retail merchandising analytics for pricing elasticity, promo ROI, and markdown optimisation is one of the fastest-growing scopes inside retail GCCs. It sits naturally next to the RGM and category work that CPG centres have been doing for years, and it uses the same modelling muscles. This is one of the reasons the India retail analytics market is projected to grow from USD 603.4 million in 2025 to USD 2.95 billion by 2034, at a CAGR of 18.73%. Much of that growth will land inside GCCs, not outside them.
Inventory and allocation. Store-level allocation, size-run intelligence, and replenishment logic are moving because they are data-heavy, rules-heavy, and reward proximity to the data engineering stack.
Visual and digital merchandising. Digital planograms, image-recognition based shelf compliance, and virtual store twins now allow merchandising standards to be designed and enforced from a remote centre in a way that felt impossible a few years ago.
Vendor and buying support. Not buying decisions themselves, at least not yet, but the analytical spine underneath them: vendor scorecards, cost negotiations backed by data, private label margin analysis.
None of these are back-office tasks. Each one has a direct line to revenue or margin, which is precisely why they are worth the friction of moving.
What Challenges Do Retail GCCs Come Across When Moving Into Merchandising?
Anyone who has actually built a GCC will tell you the same thing. The technology is the easy part. What slows this transition down is trust, and trust gets built in stages.
The first stage is execution trust, which most mature centres already have. The second is expertise trust, where head office starts to believe the GCC understands the category, the customer, and the trade the same way a merchant in head office does. The third, and the one that matters for merchandising, is judgement trust. That is the point where a head office stops asking the GCC to build a report and starts asking what the GCC would recommend.
Judgement trust cannot be demanded. It has to be earned in small moments. A promo decision the GCC flagged early. An assortment call that avoided a markdown. A pricing recommendation that held margin without hurting volume. Every one of those moments compounds, and every one of them requires a GCC leader willing to put a point of view on the table rather than a deck.
There is also a harder cultural problem underneath. Merchandising, in most retailers, is still seen as an art. The GCCs that break through are the ones that respect that. They do not try to replace the merchant. They augment the merchant with speed, with cross-market pattern recognition, and with a level of analytical rigour that no single buyer has time for. That posture, partner rather than replacement, is what makes the difference between a merchandising function that moves cleanly and one that stalls in a turf war.
What Does the Future of Retail GCC Merchandising Look Like?
The retail GCCs that will lead the next wave share a few common traits.
They are organised around outcomes, not activities. Instead of measuring themselves on tickets closed or dashboards shipped, they are measuring themselves on decisions influenced, markdown dollars saved, and full-price sell-through improved. That is a very different scoreboard, and it is the one the CFO understands. It is also the shift that partners like Polestar Analytics have been pushing at in industry roundtables recently, the move from activity metrics to outcome metrics in the age of AI.
They have collapsed the distance between data and decision. The team building the data product sits next to the team using it. The analyst who runs the assortment model sits close enough to the planner to argue about the answer. This is how India GCCs are transforming retail operations, not by replicating the head office but by rebuilding the merchandising workflow around the data.
They invest in hybrid talent. Not pure engineers, not pure analysts, and definitely not pure ex-buyers. Retail analytics capabilities inside a GCC now demand people who can hold three conversations at once, with a data engineer, with a merchant, and with a business head. That talent profile is rare, and the best GCCs are building it deliberately rather than hoping it shows up in a CV.
They partner with head office rather than orbit it. The most useful frame for Global Capability Centers in retail today is not offshore, it is on-shore-of-the-data. Wherever the data lives, the decision layer belongs next to it. In most large retailers, that means the GCC.
Final Thoughts
The story of GCCs in retail and CPG has always been a story of scope expansion, one function at a time. IT moved first. Then analytics. Then data engineering. Then RGM. Merchandising is next, and it is the most consequential move so far, because it puts the GCC inside the commercial engine of the retailer rather than alongside it.
The retailers that lean into this will get faster cycles, sharper assortments, and a merchandising function that finally moves at the speed of their data. The ones that hold back will keep paying for the gap between where their analysis lives and where their decisions get made. Enablers like Polestar Analytics working across the RGM, supply chain, and merchandising stack are seeing the same pattern repeat: the sooner the decision layer moves next to the data, the sooner the value shows up in the P&L.
Read More: How Commercial Lending Software Enhances Loan Decisions
For anyone building a retail GCC today, the question worth asking is a simple one. If merchandising is where the next decade of margin lives, and if the data that drives merchandising already sits inside the GCC, then what exactly is still keeping the decision on the other side of the ocean?
FAQs About Retail GCCs and Merchandising
1. Why are retail GCCs moving into merchandising?
The role of GCCs in retail merchandising is expanding as retailers move pricing, assortment, allocation, and markdown analytics closer to the data. The goal is faster, better-informed commercial decisions.
2. What merchandising decisions can retail GCCs realistically own?
How retail GCCs are transforming merchandising can be seen in the decisions they increasingly influence or own—from assortment optimisation and allocation to pricing, promotions, and markdowns. Ownership typically expands as the GCC builds category expertise and judgement trust.
3. What role does retail merchandising analytics play in GCCs?
Retail merchandising analytics in GCCs helps identify assortment gaps, optimise pricing and promotions, improve allocation, and reduce markdowns. The opportunity is to turn these insights into recommendations and measurable business outcomes.
4. What changes when India GCCs move from analytics to merchandising ownership?
How India GCCs are transforming retail operations becomes clearer when the GCC moves beyond producing dashboards to influencing decisions. Teams begin measuring decisions influenced, margin protected, markdowns avoided, and the speed from insight to action.
5. Which merchandising capabilities should retailers move to the GCC first?
Start with decisions where the GCC already owns the data, the decision happens frequently, and the financial impact is measurable. Pricing, promotion, assortment, allocation, and markdown optimisation are strong starting points.