Guest blog post by Primaseller
The basis of multichannel retail is that it helps you sell across channels, thus increasing the volume of sales you make. In theory, it sounds like a great idea and it is! When the time comes for implementation, though, a lot of retailers struggle with the concept itself as well as finding a way of implementing it without shaking up too many aspects of their existing business.
In this article, we address why all your stores need to be integrated, and a few issues that can arise with multichannel retail, specifically when you try and integrate Amazon, your web store, and your retail store. We also tell you how you can solve some of these problems with simple, elegant solutions.
1. All Your Channels Draw From The Same Inventory
For all your channels of sale, be they marketplaces, online stores or physical ones, the multichannel concept is that inventory is a single entity. Each of these channels of sale draw from it when a sale is made. This doesn’t mean that all of your inventory is physically in one place- just that it is treated that way.
For example, if you have 200 units of a certain product in your store, 300 units of it in a warehouse and another 200 units in an Amazon fulfilment centre, your inventory quantity for that product is 700 units. If you suddenly find that you have run out of stock for that product in your online store, you can have some inventory from your retail outlet shipped in order to fulfil orders placed online.
What, then, do you need to maintain inventory levels seamlessly in such a scenario? An excellent inventory management software! Ideally, such a software product should dynamically keep track of sales and inventory, raise alerts when inventory levels fall below a certain level and show you a breakup of which channels are generating most sales for each of your products.
2. All Your Channels Reflect The Same Brand
It doesn’t matter how few or how many channels you sell through. They’re all an extension of a single retailer, you. By integrating all of your stores and marketplaces, you can ensure that customers have a seamless experience across all of these channels. There are several aspects to consider here, some of which are listed below:
- Design your web store and retail stores such that they look and feel like one brand’s extension. Using your brand colours and message everywhere is a great way to ensure this.
- Once you move to online stores and marketplaces, content needs to be consistent. So if you have the same product both on the web store and a marketplace, ensure that the product’s description is the same in both places.
- A true omnichannel experience always tries to bring in elements of one channel into another. Offering self-checkout counters in your store, or services such as ordering online and picking up in-store are ways of subtly driving home the message that all of your channels are the same brand.
- When customers buy from you, they may pick one channel over another just for convenience’s sake. In this case, are you equipped to recognise one of your online customers in your store? Maintaining a uniform customer database helps your checkout staff strike up a relevant conversation with your patrons, whichever channel they may have shopped from earlier.
- Integrating sales information across channels helps you facilitate easier returns and handling for your customers. For example, when a customer wants to return an online order in-store, integration ensures that your store staff are not left clueless about either the customer, or their purchase, or both.
3. Customise Your Offering Across Channels
This may even have been a major reason for you to choose to sell on several other channels. There is an inherent preference for buying digital goods and consumer electronics online, while fresh produce and plants may sell better through an outlet.
Integrating sales of various products across multiple sales channels has several benefits for you:
- Integration of channels lets you go beyond the traditional performance indicators, and focus on conversion rates, consumer interest and product popularity across each channel. In turn, this helps you plan for which location needs to stock more of a certain product and which store can do with lesser.
- By using information about consumer behaviour on one channel, you may be able to extend the information into product suggestions on other channels too. This way, you would be remarketing a product of choice to a buyer across channels, and they can pick one they’re most comfortable with.
4. All Your Channels Are One Business
Beyond being a brand and presenting a single face to the consumers at large, integrating all your stores helps you treat your retail venture as one business entity. Specifically,
- It helps you allocate marketing budgets for each channel based on the channel’s unique attributes.
- It helps you observe what promotional schemes are working on one channel and figure out a way to extend the same benefits, discounts and coupons to customers across channels.
- It helps people working on all of these different channels to come together and work as one entity. One way to do this is to use a retail management software that is accessible to all of your key personnel- be it outlet managers or web store managers.
- It helps make accounting seamless. In an integrated setup, you know which products you have been able to sell on which channel, and this makes the process of bookkeeping far easier than if you had to deal with each channel as a separate entity.
- Integration lets you make key decisions on which channels need to be promoted and which channels need to be scrapped, by making a comparison of sales across channels much easier.
In short, failing to integrate your channels is akin to managing different businesses, one through a web store, another through each marketplace and then through each outlet. Businesses that behave and act separately can become a huge pain point as you proceed to add more and more channels to the mix. They make bookkeeping and inventory handling harder, they don’t feel like a single business to your employees or your customers, and they cause you a world of pain in management.
