Each retail businesses is unique and has its own complexities. But, these things, by their nature, form the core of our brand’s unique proposition to the market. This differentiation needs to come to life across all digital and physical touchpoints, because that is the only way we project a unified, impactful image. We have to take control of what the customer sees and experiences by being omnichannel, phygital or omnicommerce, or headless commerce – however you wish to call it.
As brand owners, how do we bring our retail businesses to life in a demonstrable manner? We need to piece everything a customer needs to know to make them better informed and entice them to buy. To achieve this, we build new experiences, unique catalogues or assortments, imagine fresh marketing ideas and ensure quick fulfilment.
Our customers are living 4-6 hours of their lives on digital devices. More agile, flexible and integrate-able solutions are needed to achieve what we need in today’s world. Discovery of brands is not always from the physical store first anymore; now it is changing. Customers see us on websites and marketplaces, and then in our stores. The customer’s path to purchase is not linear (advertising to store visit to conversion) because of multiple journeys that a customer can make between doors and tunnels to buy our brands. We run the risk of losing sight of the customer’s path itself, because it’s not continuous across one channel. We have to take control of what the customer sees and experiences by being omnichannel, or omnicommerce, or headless commerce – however you wish to call it.
So what is omnichannel? The definition is constantly changing and gets interpreted differently. A simple way to look at it is that it’s a sales process or system that gets us to seamlessly deliver a shopping experience to customers across all channels, devices, locations and times.
Retail environments are static. Stores keep looking the same for months and years. They gradually turn into stale spaces not attractive enough to keep customers locked in. And this is precisely why stores today have shorter lifecycles. On the other end, the digital space is completely dynamic. Customers visit our websites or marketplaces more often and exit if the products don’t resonate with them within a few blinks of the eye. This forces us to constantly change, reinvent, re-present, reformat and refresh our customer interfaces online.
The Four Pillars of Omnicommerce
1.MARKETING & PRODUCT DISCOVERY
Marketplaces like Amazon and Myntra have created a new generation of buyers who believe they can get anything, anywhere, anytime. These two, along with Ajio and Tata Cliq, consolidate the broadest offerings of marketplace products. For all categories today, brand lifecycles are shorter, competitive advantages are short-lived. Take T-shirts or jeans, for example. So many players with equivalent quality and yet smaller brands are challenging the big boys. In today’s phygital world, the better ones have it all locked down, their customers find everything seamless, they get invoices, delivery dates, status, push notifications, etc. It’s hard to invade their territory.
As marketplaces get saturated, ‘medium to small’ brands don’t feature on the early pages, so they look for new avenues to find their customers. Many brands are choosing to set up their own independent online stores. To make our own digital storefront, we need the website, the inventory, the traffic and the means to fulfil. That’s a huge challenge and becomes an important competence. Add to that SEO, SEM skills, and digital marketing programmes.
The distance between finding our products to finding a parity product (think round-neck tees and sweatpants) from a competitor is just one new tab on the customer’s browser. Discovery happens through Google and Amazon, and maybe Instagram. The directed searches (looking for brands by name) are restricted to large brands. Advertisements are helpful and important. Discovery (category keyword search) is still 80 per cent of searches. This could change over time or reduce, hard to state. SEO and Google advertising become very important here.
The quickest way to see success for any omnichannel player is to keep everything simple, seamless and all-inclusive. Easier said than done, though! The same customer visits a brand across channels, sometimes starting on the desktop, looking deeper on social media, adding to cart on an App, and finally making the purchase at night. Brands need to be prepared for any device, any channel and any payment form. Plus, a brand must also control their interactions with the customer. This is best done by using chatbots for ‘low value, low involvement’ interactions and save the sales associates and call centre assistants for the larger conversations. Learn from the fast fashion guys. Online buyers who don’t want to wait for a shipment can pick their order up in store (BOPIS: Buy Online Pick Up In Store). Customers can buy their brands directly through the Instagram page itself.
Data from past experience needs to be discarded for relevance. Have an architecture or technology stack that can accommodate changing preferences of consumers.
The quickest way to see success for any omnichannel player is to keep everything simple, seamless and all-inclusive. Easier said than done, though! The same customer visits a brand across channels, sometimes starting on the desktop, looking deeper on social media, adding to cart on an App, and finally making the purchase at night. Brands need to be prepared for any device, any channel and any payment form. Plus, a brand must also control their interactions with the customer. This is best done by using chatbots for ‘low value, low involvement’ interactions and save the sales associates and call centre assistants for the larger conversations. Learn from the fast fashion guys. Online buyers who don’t want to wait for a shipment can pick their order up in store (BOPIS: Buy Online Pick Up In Store). Customers can buy their brands directly through the Instagram page itself.
Data from past experience needs to be discarded for relevance. Have an architecture or technology stack that can accommodate changing preferences of consumers.
Commerce is about real-time interactions and that’s where online commerce has done well and benefited. Two-way communication will get faster with AI answering questions in real time and the query response being immediate. Large companies are concentrating on ‘Single Customer View’, where information from different data sources is synthesised under one roof across different services in our portfolio.
2.TECHNOLOGY FOR OMNICOMMERCE
For a long time, retailers scaling up depended on ERP solutions to take them forward and standardise operating processes and reporting systems. Enterprise software suites have been fabulous, but almost none are agile, customer centric or future proof. Legacy systems and technologies, including the mammoth ERPs, are pieces which are not effective in today’s world. But, MACH architecture is a technology that pieces together independently developed and deployed technology, with API-first open systems, SaaS that uses the cloud, implemented in a way that the front-end customer experience is decoupled from our back-end data lakes and processes. What our customer sees and interacts with is independent of everything else. Using MACH, we can scale up, replace, plug & play, and better our performance easily. Remember when offices decided to use assembled PCs rather than branded ones? If you do, then you get what I am saying.
When these technologies are integrated through smart architecture, we can achieve accelerated revenue and volume growth by pouring all channels, distributors, retailers, locations, portfolio brands simultaneously with a single, all-encompassing solution. We can design and execute a solution that can actually even deliver catalogues and product assortments to the target groups differentially based on what they need, all in real time and from one desk.
When these technologies are integrated through smart architecture, we can achieve accelerated revenue and volume growth by pouring all channels, distributors, retailers, locations, portfolio brands simultaneously with a single, all-encompassing solution. We can design and execute a solution that can actually even deliver catalogues and product assortments to the target groups differentially based on what they need, all in real time and from one desk.
Discovery of brands is not always from the physical store first anymore; now it is changing. Customers see us on websites and marketplaces, and then in our stores.
Open source needs to be the core, with mobile being the prime device; the platforms need to enable shopping experiences in any digital device or interface – smartphones, tablets, desktops and wearables, all connected to each other. If as a brand or manufacturer we can create a deeper connection with our user base and help them buy, return, give feedback, or even just interact with us irrespective of where they are in their lives or geography or in their journey with us, omnicommerce technologies will be able to democratise the customer base so that every customer can have the same kind of intimacy with our brand.
3.MANAGING YOUR INVENTORY
Not all fashion retailers have figured out the way to balance multiple sales channels either due to poor process implementation, lack of business modelling or bad profit management. Integrated inventory management across all sales channels gets important. In India, Puma and Bata led the way to doing this best. Besides the process and technology, we also must know how customer behaviour and purchase behaviour changes across channels. This helps further if backed up by the right forecasts and inventory optimisation methods.
Abercrombie, GAP, Target and Ikea have models that have lesser inventory in the backroom to make room for more online orders. This might take more capital investment at the start, but actually lowers the cost of digital fulfillment. The shops became the quickest and most efficient fulfillment model. For this type of shift to happen, it needs omnichannel inventory management to not only allocate inventory for a new purchase path, but to also maintain stock visibility for users. As customers continue to choose how they receive goods from retailers, it’s critical that retailers synchronise the locations where those customers are looking. It’s unviable to provide one outlet for purchase; today, an omnichannel approach is critical.
BOPIS is a convenience that started in 2019, a supply chain innovation that gives an edge to retailers. Customer engagement, increased traffic to brand, better sell-through and conversion percentage, and last-mile shipping savings for retailers. This was among the first innovations where the retailer decided that the inventory for online and offline will get integrated. This meant a change in the business process as well as employee training. Also, by integrating the Order Management System with the Point of Sale to provide an omnichannel experience, retailers need to build an optimised omnichannel inventory management platform built for complete visibility as they grow.
4.THE SUPPLY CHAIN
Time is moving fast; retail has to make it easier for customers to buy our products easily. We have seen in India investments in space, technology and people in the supply chain. We have become incredibly efficient and accurate on sourcing, fulfilment and delivery. A fast supply chain that is more responsive and transparent to customers, fuelled by geo-locational tracking and updates in real time – all this helps transactional success. Because of new technologies, omnichannel has become easier with curbside pick-up, in-store pick-up, endless aisle becoming more efficient, making the customer experience richer and seamless and as a result, driving conversion and sales.
Presenting your Product for Omnichannel
Google or Instagram is a discovery platform to look at things, introduces brands to consumers, how we lead them in and get consumers to convert without any friction. It’s like going to an interesting bar/gym to meet attractive people. What’s trending? What are people talking of?
Present your product correctly. Product Description Page (PDP) needs to be more explanatory, giving the differentiation of the product and how it meets customers’ needs better than others. Too many brands are still interpreting their product catalogue pages into the PDP for marketplaces. PDP and SEO are directly linked; PDP needs to be optimised for SEO. It’s still a new idea, but we need to stop asking merchandisers or designers to write our content from catalogues or the Technical Info Pack. Customers are getting smarter and they are going beyond first pages. The customers know that the first page brands on Amazon are often brands spending on advertising, so they dive deeper and look for quality special brands on the inside.
So, omnicommerce really is commerce everywhere – inspiration, discovery, research, consideration and purchase anywhere, anytime and everywhere
Conclusion
Digital transformation succeeds only when a business changes how it operates. There are transformational changes necessary, direct marketing licences, subscription services, finance and accounting processes, new policies for customers, legal issues, new skills to interact with customers, organisational design, reporting relationships, legacy technologies to change. And, above all, a sea change in how we look at data – see if we can bring it all into one place for analysis and extraction. A transformed customer journey follows.
Everything around AI and ML is built around the interplay of data and algorithms, and these are getting more complex, accurate and faster. Omnichannel will benefit hugely with these advances. One will see lesser loyalty online because the brand ceases to be experiential like in the physical space and our product imagery is what carries the brand through. The effort to switch is now just five seconds.
Data from past experience needs to be discarded for relevance. Have an architecture or technology stack that can accommodate changing preferences of consumers. Open architectures are important – Apps, solutions, platforms – the days of a single point of contact for a customer are over; now it’s about API, real time, micro-service, chatbots, etc. Remember that today, customers are not looking at building their shopping days around our brand’s life and business needs anymore. No more big days, denim days,
etcetera. Marketing cycles may turn more short-term and more measurable than earlier. Customer and brand experiences will always be about telling a great story about the history, the promise, the quality, the style quotient of our brand or which kind of people wear it. Technology will not do it for us, only enable it.
And, not to forget, customers may buy into brands and imagery, but that doesn’t mean they will accept sub-standard products. Better quality clothing with appropriate fashion quotient will always win the game.
