Omnichannel And Avoiding A Mulit-Directional Fail

The first few months have been less than wholly kind to the nation’s biggest names in retail. However, the news has not quite been completely negative. There have been a few surprise shows of strength — JCPenney and Abercrombie, we’re looking at you here — but, on the whole, the narrative has been pretty bleak.

However, if the wheezing and seizing of the physical retail environment has had any kind of silver lining of late, it has been the yet-to-be-fully-tapped power of omnicommerce. Consumers in the age of smartphones aren’t limited to shopping when they are at physical stores, and after a protracted period of giving up their lunch money to Amazon, physical retailers are realizing that they don’t have to wait for those customers to happen by them in the mall to entice them. They can reach them anywhere — in bed, in the bath, on the go. The world is everyone’s shopping oyster.

Omnichannel is the new eCommerce, which was once the new retail but is now the old retail, because, as conventional wisdom is also fond of pointing out, traditional retail is dead.

Did you find all of that confusing? Well, so do retailers, as it turns out.

“Omnichannel retail” is something of a term in transition and, at this point, is more an umbrella heading to be used to map out a lot of related, but basically separate, strategies for enhancing the customer experience and using mobile to foster better consumer engagement. So, beacon tech is part of omnichannel; so is buy online, pickup in store; so is Wi-Fi-based, in-store mapping. As the rather all-encompassing “omni” in the name implies, it is a retailing tactic that goes in a lot of directions at once.

Some retailers have fairly mastered this art. Starbucks’ order-ahead program springs to mind as the paradigmatic example of making it easy and intuitive for customers to find it, order it, pay for it with a few phone taps and use the drive over as a substitute for their wait in line, before picking up whatever hot and foamy concoction will be sending them into their day. There is a bonus in the form of easy-to-rack-up points, such that, every so often, one of those hot and foamy concoctions is actually free.

Party hats and lattes for everyone.

However, the path of omnichannel dominance is not always so easy or so smooth, and for every Starbucks making customers happy with no-wait-time mochas, there is a new beacon tech user mass-blasting anyone with their app anytime they get within 30 paces of a physical location — inspiring that customer to uninstall the app, since their heart can’t take the strain of 25 push notifications every time they try to go to a mall.

Or they keep the app but don’t go to the mall anymore. Though omnichannel and eCommerce have staunched some of the losses for physical retailers in an increasingly digitally enabled world, the baseline goal is still to get the customers into the store and looking around. Buy online, pickup in store offers the customer a convenient experience because it offers the option of the quick grab-and-go trip. Merchants, conversely, like the buy online, pickup in store model because it means the customer is still setting foot in a store, is still being exposed to merchandizing and may still just happen to find themselves spontaneously purchasing something they didn’t know they wanted.

If one’s efforts in omnicommerce just end up keeping consumers even further away from a physical store front, it is not so much a secret weapon as a Trojan horse — less a gift than a final assault on a weakened form.

Some of the problem, of course, is newness combined with nuance. The field of reaching consumers through their mobile phones so they feel assisted instead of assaulted is still a developing one, made additionally complicated by the fact that there are no easy answers up for grabs — what works brilliantly for one merchant or category of merchants may serve to complete bewilder the customer base of another.

However, there are also a few recurring wounds that can only and best be described as self-inflicted — execution errors that serve to push customers away from the product. And perhaps there are a few quick and easy rules that merchants should consider before touting their brilliantly integrated digital and physical commerce superstructure.

Rules such as:

If you offer buy online, pickup in store, it has to be fairly immediate. If the customer has to wait a week for it to ship to a store location, they are going to order it from Amazon and have it delivered to their house in two days. 

This is the most prevalent omnichannel retail fail we found, and we found it across a wide variety of retailers of some pretty impressive scales. Walmart, in fact, was among the worst offenders, as was Home Depot. These stores offer an order online, pickup in store option, but for a rather wide selection of goods, there was a wait. And, actually, a pretty long one — often four or five days before the goods we wanted to order were going to be at a store.

Now, granted, we did try this from a suburban, as opposed to urban, locale, which might have added a day or two. The problem is that all of the goods we tested were things Amazon could deliver to our door within two days (we are Prime members as an office). At the point that online-to-offline buying didn’t scratch our instant gratification itch any faster and was, in fact, running behind a pure online buy, there seemed little reason to schedule a trip to Walmart a week from now.

If the offerings online are much, much better than the in-store offerings, you will drive consumers away from your stores.

There are all kinds of reasons for offering Web-exclusive products, and many of those reasons are perfectly sensible security or economic concerns.

However, when all the “good stuff” is available online only, consumers get the hint pretty quickly that the in-store experience is not a priority.

The big offenders in this area seemed to be apparel retailers, particularly those appealing to young (or youngish) upper-middle-market consumers — J.Crew and Anthropologie were the big “winners” here, with an Honorable Mention going to Gap brands and H&M. And accessories seemed to be a particularly popular place to hoard the real pretties online, with an obviously lower selection on offer for in-store pickup.

The goal of omnicommerce is to get channels working together, not competing with each other.

And finally:

If it makes the customer’s life harder, they are not coming back.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one: You order something online, you don’t want it, you try to return it to the store. The store says no because it was purchased online; it needs to be mailed back with the shipping label it was good enough to provide.

Now, of course, shipping something back is not terribly hard, and many consumers prefer it. There are some, however, that like to put their return into someone’s physical hands, and those folks are nonplussed when they can’t return a good because it was bought on a different channel. It is particularly irritating when said object is visibly on display.

And while there are many variations on this problem — delayed refunds when returns take a circuitous path, strange terms and conditions for using digital services — the outcome is similar.

The customer buys elsewhere.

Which arguably indicates that the retailer has not only missed with omnichannel, it’s also managed to hit its own foot with that silver bullet that was supposed to reverse its difficult fortunes in physical commerce.