Crafting Integrated Multichannel Retailing Strategies

Abstract

Multichannel retailing is the set of activities involved in selling merchandise or services to consumers through more than one channel. Multichannel retailers dominate today's retail landscape. While there are many benefits of operating multiple channels, these retailers also face many challenges. In this article, we discuss the key issues concerning multichannel retailing, including the motivations and constraints of going multichannel, the challenges of crafting multichannel retailing strategies and opportunities for creating synergies across channels, key retail mix decisions facing multichannel retailers, and the dynamics of multichannel retailing. We synthesize current knowledge drawn from the academic literature and industry practice, and discuss potential directions for future research.

Understanding the customer experience in the age of omni-channel shopping

“…Thus, in multi-channel retailing, the retailer offers several channels as independent entities in order to align them with specific targeted customer segments (Frazer & Stiehler, 2014;Picot-Coupey et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2010). The next stage in the evolution of retailing is cross-channel, which includes the first attempts to integrate brick-and-mortar stores and web channels and enhance the cross-functionality between them (Cao, 2014;Cao & Li, 2015;Harris, 2012).…”

“…Omni-channel strategy refers to an ideal strategy that offers several channels in accordance with the latest technological developments and current consumer behavior (Verhoef et al, 2015b;Zhang et al, 2010). Omni-channel marketing is characterized by the use of a customer-centric approach with a view to offering consumers a holistic shopping experience (Gupta, Lehmann, & Stuart, 2004;Hansen & Sia, 2015;Shah, Rust, Parasuraman, Staelin, & Day, 2006) by allowing them to use several consumer-store interaction channels simultaneously (e.g., use of mobile Internet access in a physical retail store to research products and/or compare prices) (Lazaris & Vrechopoulos, 2014;Verhoef et al, 2015b).…”

M‐payment service: Interplay of perceived risk, benefit, and trust in service adoption

“…Mobile service and device, such as smartphones or smartwatches, providers have implemented various strategies to enhance consumer shopping experiences across selling channels. Today, multichannel selling is the norm of the retail industry (Van Baal, 2014;Zhang et al, 2010). In order to maintain a stable customer base, capture high market share, and increase revenue, most brick-and-mortar retailers sell their products through other channels, including catalogs and the Internet (Yang, Lu, & Chau, 2013).…”

The Digital Transformation of the Retail Electricity Market in Spain

“…These reports rarely detail the full set of indicators used in their assessment and tend to define arbitrary weights for the indicators. The approaches to the study and characterization of channel integration levels used by scholarly research, on the other hand, tend to focus on specific aspects of integration strategies, but without a clear and structured framework of study (e.g., [33,41,42,53,54]). The only research that has addressed this topic with an integral view is [15].…”