Omnichannel Commerce has been guiding strategies and investments in the retail industry since 2010. In its simplest form, a successful omnichannel strategy aims to serve consumers across multiple channels and deliver an experience that blends the best of each world.

The industry has seen traditional retailers and brands make significant investments in their online presence, sometimes through the acquisition of digitally native companies, other times through multi-year investments. The industry has also seen some digitally native businesses move into the physical store space to increase their profits.

In most cases, the consumer experience is drastically different across the physical and digital worlds, resulting in disappointing experiences: stockouts, missed orders, price differences, disparate customer service and more. A business can sell products and services on both channels, but that doesn’t necessarily result in a seamless consumer experience.

This difference in the consumer experience across channels reflects the current focus on expanding channels, but not on a clear consumer-centric strategy. A few of the areas where discrepancies are most noticeable include inventory planning and pricing:

• Inventory Planning: Historically, store-based planning systems were optimized for a single channel. These systems were based on demand signals that oftentimes took weeks or months to be translated into inventory positions across that company’s network. Digitally native companies, however, have developed strong, direct links between demand signals and inventory planning, thus quickly translating signals into action multiple times a day. Merging these two channels together and operating on a single inventory planning system will maximize inventory productivity and unlock significant value to any retailer.
• Pricing: In e-commerce, prices are easily changed. The ability to micro-target or adapt prices to a single consumer allows retailers to extract significant value. Similar strategies, however, are more challenging in the physical store environment. Oftentimes, retailers will have to maintain parallel pricing strategies between their digital and physical stores. They often create price matching policies to reassure consumers they are getting the best price available. A retailer’s ability to leverage their digital apps, location services and analytics creates opportunities to deploy smarter, consumer-focused pricing in the offline world.