In a world where ecommerce has become mainstream and retailers raced to build unified commerce business models, some brands are starting to consider returning to multichannel structures. While this may present an opportunity to unlock value for stockholders, it is the opposite of what consumers are looking for in retail. Unified commerce is a total ecosystem of seamless, frictionless processes that put the consumer first. Today it is no longer about getting the right product at the right price, it is about getting the right product, at the …
Fulfillment: Retail’s New Loyalty Factor
Covid has forced many retailers to make dramatic shifts toward digital transformation of their business models. Many have successfully pivoted to offer services including BOPIS, curbside pick-up, and same-day home delivery across their digital, customer facing touchpoints. But as many customer surveys have shown, the ability to execute on the fulfillment part of that equation in aggregate has been lackluster. Why It Matters These statistics reported by Salesforce in October 2020 are all too familiar: 60 percent of customers will cancel …
Measuring the New Normal: Retail’s KPI Challenge
The media has been busy proclaiming the coming death of both the store and experiential retailing in a voice that has grown progressively louder over the course of the last decade. The scourge of Covid-19 is now being touted as the cataclysmic event that will signal the coming of a dramatic shift in the channel mix of retail. Some even have predicted that the penetration of digital sales could reach 40-50 percent of total sales by 2021. But what if the metrics the industry typically uses to measure channel performance are wrong? This 50 …