Shoppers are growing so accustomed to the ease of buying online that bricks and mortar stores struggle to satisfy them anymore, Intel's global head of retail has warned Australian traders.

Jon Stine said he visited Australia recently and thought talk that Amazon's arrival on its shores in November would cause a "retail Armageddon" was "nonsense".

Rather, the sector globally was entering a period of "accelerated Darwinian evolution" in which businesses could either change or perish, he told a group of Australian retail managers in New York City on Sunday, ahead of the National Retailers Federation's annual expo.

Survival required retailers with bricks and mortar stores to recognise customers' expectations had been dramatically altered by online shopping, where they could easily learn about products, know what was available and make payments with a single click.

"A normative expectation for shopping is no longer the store - the normative expectation for shopping is the internet," he said.