How Many Channels Can One Customer Buy Through?
What is omnichannel retail strategy ?
It is an approach that provides customers with a fully-integrated shopping experience by uniting user experiences from brick-and-mortar to online browsing from a mobile device, tablet or computer and everything in between.
Meet Zoe. She’s a retail shopper. Unlike retail shoppers of previous generations, however, she doesn’t just drive to the store, look around in hopes of seeing what she might want to buy, and then casually strolls to the cash register to pay for the items she plans to take home. Zoe is mobile, agile, and has a short attention span.
The first step Zoe takes in the shopping cycle is an online search. She’s looking for a new pair of shoes.
Zoe knows the size she wears, but she’s not comfortable buying shoes without trying them on. So she looks for shoes that she likes, downloads the pictures to her computer’s hard drive, then bluetooth’s them over to her cell phone so she can have access to them while she’s shopping. Then she runs out her door to the nearest shoe store to try on shoes.
Once in the store, Zoe opens her cell phone and browses the images of shoes she saved earlier. Then she looks for similar shoes on the shelves of the shoe store and tries a few on to see if they fit right. Then she snaps pictures of the shoe labels on the box with her cell phone, ensuring to capture the brand of shoe, the manufacturer, the size, and the color.
After going on about her business, she goes home and makes dinner. Later that night, she opens her phone and searches for shoes by manufacturer and brand, hoping to find the exact shoes she liked at the brick-and-mortar store earlier that day.
When she finds the shoes she wants online, she then does some comparison shopping to find the best price and shipping details. After a thorough search, she makes a purchase, having her shoes delivered to her door at home the next day. She is satisfied that she was able to buy a pair of shoes that she likes, and that fit, at the lowest price possible, and have them sent directly to her doorstep.
It’s a reality in today’s retail shopping environment. Customers shop through multiple channels. And because they do, retailers should have an omnichannel retail strategy to make the buying experience the best it can be for shoppers. Learn more about ChainDrive’s ability to make this happen with web order fulfillment software.
To discover the power of our Fully-Integrated ERP and Omni-channel retail Software Solutions for your retail, e-tail or wholesale business, request a free online demo and we will be glad to show you how our software suite can help scale-up your retail business and take your retail chain to the next level.
