The Retail industry has long had the dream of uniting all channels seamlessly. One in which each consumer feels important as an individual and the experience becomes genuinely personal. The elements for omni-channel selling are shaping in to existence and here are the four essential ones:
1. Identifying the Need and Creating the Desire to Buy
For most consumers, the desire to buy pops up in the midst of day-to-day activities or when checking out various types of media. While watching TV, an advertisement may hit the purchase nerve and interest towards buying is piqued. The natural next step is to dig out the phone from one’s pocket or the tablet from the coffee table to see where you can get the item at the lowest price. A consumer goes to the site of a local store, finds out the price and availability of the product and likes what they see.
Examples:
- Google, Bing – product search
- Amazon – price comparisons, product descriptions, international options
2. In-store Customer Identification
The next day the potential customer shows up to the store with their phone. The iBeacon system in use at the physical store detects that the consumer has visited their site earlier and the salesperson gets an immediate notification of this on their tablet. They can directly see from the app at their disposal which products the customer has looked at online and can offer the product in question at once.
The salesperson also can see what the customer has bought before, what size, and how active the customer is and can immediately recommend other suitable items to achieve additional sales.
Examples:
3. Checkout and Payment
Shopping is considered by many to be enjoyable and in some cases even therapeutic, but payment is generally a necessary evil. Fortunately, modern technology offers many options to reduce the pain. When the customer is ready to buy, they simply take a photo of the product’s barcode, confirm their e-mail address (this too was already known before) and press the payment button. When the single-use PIN code appears on the customer’s phone, the salesperson enters it in their system completing the purchase.
The store’s system gets immediate notification of the successful purchase, the store’s CRM system is updated with the consumer’s address information and the payment occurred behind the scenes without touching a wallet or payment terminal – within 30 seconds of the making the decision to buy.
Examples:
- Paytrail – payments and address information management
- Fiverun – enterprise retail platform
4. After Sales and Customer Service
The consumer’s receipt is sent to their email along with a discount code to use online, and any warranty information is saved in their Paytrail account.
Because the business uses a unified information system for both the online and physical stores, online marketing can also recommend suitable products for the consumers.
The purchase behaviour of the consumer can be activated and directed, for example with the aid of discount coupons, to new products. The live chat customer service of the online store gives the customer a convenient way to offer feedback or ask questions about products.
Live Chat Services:
A Complete Information System for a Business
In order for the above omni-channel experience to be possible, a business needs to have a sophisticated system where all the needed information streams could be managed and presented to a business in a useable form.
This kind of unified information system would be incredibly complex with its inventory management, registers and marketing automation, which only the very largest businesses might have the means to develop – if even them. Other similar functionality can be imported into e-commerce with automation so that the required information can be transferred between channels as seamlessly as possible and in real time.
E-commerce automation services:
- Flashnode (in Finnish) – e-commerce information automation as an SaaS service
- Mulesoft - system integration platform
Read also:
4 Ways to Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment on Your Website
5 Reasons to Consider the Mobile in e-commerce
Need products to sell online? Check out China
Written by Lennu Keinänen - Oct 14, 2014
