Mark Oldani of Circuit City is asked how he utilizes and coordinates the company’s retail stores with its online sales. The answer is simple and quite intuitive: A seamless customer interface across all channels.
It really makes sense since it makes it easy for customers to deal with the company, and rids them of the headache of a split “company personality”, and instead lets them deal with a company that has a single identity. As customers, I don’t believe we think of the underlying structures of companies, we see the brand and expect every channel of the brand to recognize us as its customer.
While this may seem trivial from this perspective, I imagine that a company starting out with a retail business and a traditional bricks-and-mortar business model may very well carry the “baggage” (as named by Afuah and Tucci) that would make it separate the channels more sharply, even from the customers’ perspective.
Oldani goes on to describe the popularity of in-store pickup, which I can really identify myself with. At least when purchasing technological items I almost always make the order online to be sure I get exactly the right item and not have the stress of a line of people waiting for me to get done when discussing with the cashier. If I don’t have an online order when I get to the store I often times even use the computers there to place an online order and then use the quick pick up line to simply pick up the item.
However, when buying things that are not technological products, such as clothes or similar products that are easily evaluated physically, I prefer in store shopping.
To summarize, strong coordination between retail and online (and whatever other channels there might be) is essential, and quite an obvious conclusion looking at it from a top down – and not from a traditional retail business’ – perspective. Other than that, there is not really much to add.
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3 comments:
I really believe multi channel retailing is the way to go. I also often put up my order online when shopping from webhallen, the company I assume you speak of in your blog, and then just fetch my purchase at the store. Or sometimes I've even asked to look at products at the store, then gone home to later make up my mind and then place my order. I think this is a good approach for any company that has the resources for it. But ofcourse the border between the physical and digital stores should be seamless, which of course would require strong coordination inbetween them, as you say.
I think retail Store and online store can co-exist depend on product. Every customer has different demand on product. The key of martketing on Retail store and online store is correspond with customers. Confidence of product lead the firm to build solid brand. To build reputation, the firm or store should think of credit in product.
in a similar context, more and more offline shops becomes 'exhibition hall' or 'show room' while more and more items are purchased via online. maybe, because I'm a bit old, but, still, for books, I prefer to purchase in the book shops, while I do purchase via amazon for foreign books, esp. the items in the long tail.
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