Editorial Articles

The recent quarter day saw a series of unfortunate casualties, with a number of familiar high-street names being found to be in the midst of challenging times. Far from simply pointing to a consumer spending dip, the recent struggle of retailers such as Dixons and Habitat points to one clear need for multichannel retail brands: a tightly wound and efficient e-commerce strategy. Regardless of their size, the various sales channels of a retailer are of little consequence to shoppers, who now have a world of choice at their fingertips and can easily purchase elsewhere if they don’t get the shopping experience they expect.

The key is to avoid purchase abandonment at all costs, and too many retailers do not seem to consider this as part of their multichannel strategy. For example, allowing consumers to pay online and collect the product in store at their convenience is much more likely to ensure the sale. It’s even more convenient if you enable a ‘ship from store’ policy, where a customer is able to determine exactly when and where they would like the item to be delivered to their home. The current reserve and pick up option that many retailers employ simply leaves the door open for customers to abandon online purchase with impunity.

Integrating social commerce
With the social media revolution producing a plethora of platforms for ecommerce professionals to communicate with their customers, businesses are keen to see how they can make it part of their wider multichannel strategy. To this point, recent findings from Efficient Frontier found that 53 per cent of retail transactions involving Facebook directly converted (from Facebook to checkout). The success of Groupon and high-profile launches such as Facebook Deals have meant that the group-buying and social commerce phenomenon is under particularly close scrutiny and both journalists and retailers are looking to separate the fact from the fiction amid the hype.

In truth, there are a series of tactics you need to go through methodically to build a multichannel strategy. People tend to talk about individual items on their agenda (such as social commerce) as a series of different silos. The problem with this approach is that if you implement one tactic in isolation, it will have very little value as an extension of your other multichannel services. For example, if someone says ‘we need a mobile strategy’, they may build some mobile services but they may have nothing to do with anything a customer wants or already uses – for example, they may have a mobile site but does it integrate with their Facebook presence or in-store inventory access or store-locator functionality?

Where to start with digital integration
You rarely see a joined up piece of thinking which says, forget long-term (long-term means nothing in ecommerce – in five years iPads will seem completely out of date), what are you going to do in the next two years? Instead of thinking in terms of in-store timeframes, where leases may last for years, think in terms of 18 months. Decide where you want to be after that period of time, then work backwards and figure out what will be the biggest bang for the buck on that tactical road. Then, ironically, the series of isolated tactics which get thrown around in board meetings can form the basis of a more effective integrated strategy. If you don’t define what your end result is, though, it will be meaningless.

It may be last on their priority list but almost every retailer knows that they want ‘social commerce’ to run as part of their campaign. They’re convinced they need to have it but, in truth, there’s often a complete confusion as to what ‘it’ is. They know they want it, they just don’t know what they want.

In an environment where consumers are able to determine buying options on their own terms, it is certainly no longer in the interests of retailers to keep their customer waiting on the highstreet, especially when they know that there are much more sophisticated support options available online. A robust online plan, designed to support the overall needs of the business, can help to balance out any unexpected difficulties that a bricks and mortar store may experience.

Hosein Moghaddas
VP & MD International, of GSI Commerce