Digital commerce B2C omnichannel

Since the majority of our clients are retail chains, we have carried out hundreds of user tests, in-depth interviews, analyzes and strategic workshops. In this way, we have built up a unique position and insight, which is absolutely essential to achieve our vision of "creating Norway's (and perhaps the world's) best digital commerce solutions." 

The interaction between digital commerce and physical store 

We see that consumers begin their shopping journey by going wide digitally if, for example, they want to buy a new sofa. They visit perhaps five different online stores initially before deciding which two stores they will take the time to visit at the weekend. Seems familiar, right? When we conducted exit interviews in physical stores for one of our customers, 90% of the visiting respondents had already visited the online store, before choosing to go to the store.   

The challenge for many retailers is that the experience their customers get in the online store excludes them from taking part in the next step of the customer's purchase process. The reasons are many, and for one of our customers we found a UX error in the online store which caused most of the visitors to conclude that this company did not have the brand they were looking for. Not only had the turnover of this brand decreased in online store, there was also a significantly lower turnover of this brand in the chain's stores in the same period.   

Not so strange perhaps? Of course not. In principle, our job is very simple, we find such errors and then we fix them. Sounds banal, yet our experience suggests that most people primarily focus on known errors that prevent conversion, while at the same time there are many unknown "silent conversion killers" that are big loss sinks that you don't know about.   

We know that this is the case, because we have measured the results of our work over several years and, on average, our customers have increased their turnover by 46% in the first months after the launch of our new online store, compared to the old one. 
 

How we solve 4 well-known challenges within omnichannel 

Advance stocks

We have built an extension of Adobe Commerce that allows us to allocate an online store order to the one of the chain's physical stores from which it is most appropriate to send the item to the customer. Store employees are notified when they receive a new order and it is easy to send the item. That way, you avoid making unnecessary purchases to the central warehouse and the online store is a concrete source of income for the physical stores. 

Read more about the success Norli has had with this strategy here.
 

Click & collect 

Click & collect can be used to reserve goods in store that you want to evaluate before you buy, or you can make the purchase in the online store and only use the physical store as a delivery point. In any case, Click & Collect is more demanding to implement than another online store function. Because you depend on a good integration between digital commerce and the store's POS system, which the store employees must use to handle click & collect orders. Not all POS systems handle this well, PearlConvert has therefore built Omnifox, which is a separate SaaS service that is easy for store employees to use.  
 

Personalization & Loyalty 

A successful omnichannel strategy gives you the opportunity to take a more holistic approach to the customer journey by looking at the customer relationship across channels rather than channel specifics. This insight gives you the opportunity to work more relevant, personal and data-driven in your work with marketing and loyalty. 

Read more about Sunkost, which uses Voyado together with Magento ecommerce to work with loyalty across channels.

PIM & DAM 

Every modern omnichannel actor is his own media house, at the same time it is demanding to both have control over product information, but also work effectively with product enrichment. Each channel sets its own requirements for media and product information, the market demands faster time-to-market and more rates internationally, which in turn require local adaptations. Neither ERP, POS nor ecommerce platforms solve these tasks well enough for most people, so many have started to centralize this work in a separate dedicated system, PIM & DAM.   

Read more about Pimcore and how we work with PIM and DAM here. 

Omnichannel, slomnichannel, stop being so fancy. It's an online store! 

If you want to create a valuable interaction across digital commerce and physical stores, you have to break down the silo mentality internally. The project must be anchored in the top management and include employees across the chain's business areas.   

The project's success is not only measured by the online store's turnover. Increasing turnover in the stores, increasing loyalty or establishing a customer club across channels can be just as important objectives.   

It is more than an online store project, it requires a collaboration partner who is used to the challenges that come with system architecture and integrations across systems such as ERP, POS, OMS, CRM/CDP, Marketing automation, Personalization and Customer Club. Who not only understand the individual systems, but who are able to see how they together help to meet the end customer's expectations and their objectives.   

Our experience is that since such projects involve key people across the organisation, there is often an element of protecting one's own areas of responsibility and internal political challenges that must be dealt with. Because it is only when you are able to put the customer's expectations first that you have a good starting point for success with omnichannel.   

We are happy to work strategically and operationally together with you in such considerations.