Overcoming Channel-Management Challenges

Multichannel retailing used to be a lot simpler — for instance, a company might sell through a catalog as well as through resellers. The online marketplace has made channel management a lot more challenging as industry leaders have developed new ways of using emerging technologies to enhance their relationships with customers. Customers, in turn, expect a lot more out of their shopping experience — online and offline.

What does it mean to integrate channels?

Retailers that have brick-and-mortar locations as well as an online presence know that customers like to shop online but may prefer to buy products in-store. And according to an AMR Research Report, once the customer is in the store (either to buy an item featured on the Web site or return an item ordered from the Web site), that customer's purchase increases by an average of 58 percent. So integrating channels is important not just for customer satisfaction, but also for increasing sales.

Multichannel promotions and marketing might include:

• Coupons that can be used online, in-store or for phone orders
• Offering customers the ability to order online and pick up the item in-store
• Catalogs that make it easy for customers to shop in-store or online

Channel-management challenges

To offer shoppers the ease of returning online purchases to a brick-and-mortar location, the retailer must have tight order-management and inventory-locator systems. Older legacy technology can slow integration with newer systems, compromising your ability to react quickly to customer needs across channels.

The goal of multichannel retailing is really to provide a consistent customer experience across all channels in which the customer interacts with the retailer — and customers have come to expect smooth sailing in dealing with retailers online and in person. Late adopters of multichannel inventory locator systems are thus at a clear disadvantage.

Multichannel solutions

According to the Nielsen/NetRatings eShopping index, visits to multichannel retailers are increasing faster than online-only or offline-only sales. Fortunately, there are many ways to make your customers' multichannel shopping experience a more pleasant one. Even if inventory-management applications are currently built on different IT infrastructures, a good order-management and inventory-locator system can allow these applications to exchange data in real time to let your organization:

• Provide a faster, more satisfying experience for the customer than manually tracking down a product.
• Allow inventory in one channel to be ordered through another.
• Empower customers to do product research on your site before shopping — for instance, by comparing similar products or using a ZIP code search to find a nearby store.
• Reward store associates for promoting online sales instead of viewing them as competition.

Customers have come to expect the convenience of fully-automated multichannel order-management and inventory-locator systems. The need to adapt only grows stronger as customers increase their multichannel shopping tendencies.

Corporate Express is a single-source international partner that provides a variety of products and services to assist businesses. To learn more about CE's products and services, contact us at 1.888.238.6983 or visit www.corporateexpress.com.

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