Ensuring Seamless eCommerce Across Channels: Is Your Business Up For The Challenge?

While browsing Pinterest, a sleek pair of running shoes catches a customer’s eye. They click through the brand’s pin to the website and add the shoes to their cart, but decide to wait.

The next day, they revisit the site on their tablet, find the shoes still in their cart, and take advantage of the first-time discount. Later, they receive an email alert about low stock, prompting them to complete the purchase. This seamless interaction across Pinterest, mobile, tablet, and email exemplifies the ideal journey of today’s customer, who expects a comprehensive omnichannel eCommerce experience.

Every retailer agrees that modern consumers want a seamless and integrated shopping experience across multiple online and offline channels. By leveraging an omnichannel eCommerce approach, businesses can create a connected & consistent customer journey.

Reports state that companies adopting an omnichannel eCommerce approach witnessed an 89% increase in customer engagement^[i]. Omnichannel eCommerce consolidates physical stores, websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms, eliminating silos and providing a unified brand experience. Furthermore, this approach ensures that customer data and preferences are shared across all channels, enabling a focus on preferred or recently reviewed products and personalizing interactions.

Ultimately, omnichannel eCommerce can transform retail by blurring the boundaries between physical and digital channels, placing customers at the center. But how do businesses maximize the true potential of this ‘integrated commerce’ approach?

In this blog post, we’ll decipher the ins and outs of omnichannel commerce, the challenges businesses face while implementing it, strategies to overcome these challenges, and more.

The Rise of Omnichannel eCommerce

Consumer behavior has significantly evolved, with modern shoppers focusing on engaging interactions across multiple channels. Today’s consumers value convenience, flexibility, and personalized experiences, often starting their shopping journey on one channel and continuing it on another.

They also expect steady pricing, promotions, product information, and access to their shopping carts or wish lists, regardless of the channel they choose to engage with. The shift in consumer expectations and high digital adoption has driven businesses to adopt omnichannel commerce strategies, ensuring they meet the increasing demand.

A report by Sitecore states that marketers using an omnichannel commerce strategy can achieve a 10% boost in average customer spending, a 23% increase in customer purchase frequency, and a 13% rise in average order size.

Even more, based on a study by IDC, omnichannel customers provide 30% higher lifetime value to a business than those who purchase using only a single channel. Ultimately, by embracing omnichannel commerce, businesses can not only enhance customer satisfaction & loyalty but also drive significant revenue growth.

However, despite the clear advantages, implementing a successful omnichannel strategy comes with its own set of challenges. Let’s delve into some common obstacles businesses face when striving to create a seamless omnichannel eCommerce experience.

Challenges in Creating Seamless Omnichannel eCommerce Experiences

• Lack of a Digital Strategy: The first challenge that arises in implementing an omnichannel commerce approach is acting without a clear digital strategy and plan. This can lead to ad hoc decisions, resulting in fragmented systems and wasted budgets on short-lived solutions.

• Subpar Technology Selection: Rushing to adopt any technology without proper analysis often results in poor choices. Therefore, businesses must thoroughly evaluate their needs, processes, and customer behavior before selecting suitable technology solutions to implement the omnichannel approach.

• No/Low Organizational Readiness: Many organizations and leaders are not adequately prepared for the changes required by omnichannel strategies. They should understand modern customer expectations and technological trends to adopt omnichannel commerce accurately.

• Lack of Employee Support: Successful implementation of an omnichannel strategy requires transparent communication, training, and team engagement. These parameters are necessary for projects to succeed due to a lack of understanding and support from employees.

• Process Inefficiencies: While adopting the omnichannel approach, disorganized processes within the organization can create chaos and inefficiency. It’s essential to define and standardize key processes related to sales and marketing to ensure a unified approach.

• Low Scalability: A significant challenge in developing new online & offline channels is the inflexible monolithic eCommerce systems, where changes to one component impact the entire system. Here, adopting the composable commerce approach can provide a scalable and flexible solution, enabling customization and easy updates.

• Ineffective Integration of Channels and Systems: When implementing omnichannel sales, ineffective integrations can raise issues such as slow order processing, increased manual work, and system errors, negatively impacting customer experience.

• Inaccurate Data Management: Managing data across multiple channels can lead to inconsistencies, errors, and a fragmented customer experience. Here, businesses should implement an approach that centralizes data, reduces redundancy, and provides reliable, up-to-date information across all platforms.

• Outdated Systems: Outdated systems can hinder the implementation of omnichannel strategies. Here, integrating legacy systems with newer solutions or transitioning to modern architectures becomes necessary.

• Decentralized Analytics: Without centralized analytics, managing and optimizing omnichannel efforts is difficult. However, implementing business intelligence tools that provide comprehensive dashboards and reports can help businesses make data-driven decisions and quickly adapt to changing conditions.

Navigating Omnichannel eCommerce Challenges With Actionable Strategies

1. Secure Stakeholder Buy-In

To successfully implement an omnichannel strategy, businesses should secure stakeholder buy-in. They should also engage all business areas such as store operations, customer experience, and IT. Furthermore, keeping transparent communication and involving teams in the planning process can help businesses identify pain points and ensure commitment.

2. Optimize Back-End Processes

Structured and efficient processes are key to a successful omnichannel strategy. Therefore, defining and standardizing sales & marketing processes across the company becomes imperative to avoid chaos. Businesses can achieve a unified view of the customer journey by centralizing data management and ensuring all departments collaborate.

3. Implement Composable Commerce

Traditional monolithic eCommerce systems are often inflexible and hard to scale. By adopting Composable eCommerce, businesses can customize and scale their systems as needed. This approach ensures that the technology infrastructure is agile and future-ready.

4. Enhance Data Integration

Effective integration of data across channels and systems is crucial for an omnichannel strategy. Businesses should create a robust integration layer to ensure that data is exchanged automatically, reducing manual work, minimizing errors, and providing an exceptional customer experience.

5. Utilize Smart Data Capture

Smart data capture technology enables workers to gather information from barcodes, texts, and objects. This capability supports real-time decision-making & workflow automation and optimizes operational tasks. For example, Mobile Point-of-Sale Systems (mPOS) enables customers to check out from anywhere in the store, reducing wait times.

6. Hybrid Shopping Experiences

Not all customers prefer the same shopping methods. Providing hybrid shopping options, such as self-checkout and mobile self-scanning, caters to customers who prefer to self-serve. Furthermore, facilitating online information in-store through smartphones and Augmented Reality (AR) overlays enables customers to access product details, reviews, and availability.

7. Optimize Fulfillment Processes

Efficient fulfillment is crucial in an omnichannel strategy. Ensuring timely delivery or collection of orders is key to customer satisfaction. Businesses can implement technologies that aid in accurate and quick order picking, such as augmented reality and multi-scanning barcodes.

8. Focus on Personalization

Personalization plays a crucial role in boosting customer loyalty. By leveraging customer data to provide tailored recommendations, rewards, and promotions, businesses can keep customers engaged and encourage repeat purchases. Additionally, integrating smart data capture with customer loyalty apps enables retailers to present personalized in-store offers.

9. Embrace Continuous Learning and Adaptation

The business environment is constantly evolving, and so should your omnichannel strategy. Continuous learning, staying updated with market trends, and adapting to new technologies are essential for long-term success. So businesses should engage employees in ongoing training and development.

Wrapping Up

A robust omnichannel strategy builds brand uniformity and boosts the bottom line by delivering an integrated customer experience across all touchpoints. It also meets modern consumers’ expectations for convenience, consistency, and personalization.

To help you create a robust omnichannel strategy and effectively map customer journeys, we invite you to join our upcoming webinar – The Omnichannel Odyssey: Crafting Seamless eCommerce Experiences.

Join the live webinar to gain actionable insights from industry experts on how to drive your eCommerce store sales and revenue with a robust omnichannel strategy in place. Register now!

Transform Your Customer Experience, Operations, and Sales With Omnichannel Commerce. Let’s Talk!

References:

^[i] SquareTalk