Being a Pioneer Requires Unstoppable Perseverance.

I read with delight a story that recently appeared in Internet Retailer. You might ask, why on earth would a story in Internet Retailer be such a thrill? After eight years of evangelizing the virtues of multichannel customer interaction to the retail industry, it sounds like they actually might be coming around. When the Internet was first evolving, most large retailers established their initial Web sites as separate and distinct divisions, groups, etc. For example, if they had a catalog operation, the Web site became an extension of that group--separate and apart from the big money maker, the "brick and mortar" store operation. This approach essentially put corporate online divisions and retail stores in competition for customers. What did not seem to register with either group was that the online customer is the same customer that shops in store. While a customer might shop online for a small commodity item because it is convenient to use the Web, the big ticket purchases still primarily happen in store. Customers want to use the Web to do the research, but buy in store to see, touch, and try out the big ticket products. Therefore, the opportunity to leverage the combined power of the online and in store channels for loyal customers is tremendous. But the fact remains that if the online team views the brick and mortar stores as competitors for the same customer, there is no incentive for the two groups to work together. In the end, customers want to select their purchase channel based upon their own criteria, and not be driven to a particular channel because of the way the corporations are organized internally. After all, retailers spend billions of dollars annually on advertising and promotion with one goal in mind: to drive customers into their stores. Why? Because they know that once the customer walks through the front door, the average transaction value per customer store visit is higher than online by a factor of two. So in the end, it is in the best interest of senior management to better leverage the traffic that comes to their Web site, and to provide a smoother transition from online to in store. To read the Internet Retailer article, Where does the web team belong?, click here.