2023 marked the conscious merging of the digital and physical worlds in the retail space. Following the post-pandemic “highs,” the 2023 Consumer Outlook report highlights how eCommerce growth is stabilizing around the globe. However, as compared to a couple of years back, eCommerce brands are experiencing a cost surge in customer acquisition costs. In the face of fierce competition, customer experience is the new battleground to differentiate, engage, and acquire customers.

In a dynamic market, it’s challenging to understand how consumers will change their spending behavior in 2024 and beyond. Going forward in 2024, eCommerce retailers must further balance their in-store experience with online options to ensure consistency and coherence. The modern buyer journey has many stages covering different channels, each serving a different purpose. Websites, eCommerce aggregators, mobile apps, and physical stores are all valid ports of call, even over the course of a single purchase transaction. Omnichannel options are now necessities for digital-native retail brands to survive in a competitive market.

This brings the focus on to their omnichannel strategy.

The statistics look encouraging. Companies with a well-developed omnichannel approach retain nearly 90% of their customers. These companies also see their annual revenues increasing by 9.5%, as against just 3.4% for companies without an omnichannel strategy. Clearly, retailers need a holistic approach to survive and thrive in today’s age of omnichannel retail.

In this blog, we will look at the latest omnichannel trends in the eCommerce retail industry and how to address the various challenges of omnichannel.

How Omnichannel is transforming eCommerce

A Forrester study found that 32% of retail brands plan to set up (or expand) their in-person store experience. 82% of eCommerce brands believe that physical stores will have a critical role in their business growth.

It’s not just retail brands. Among the latest trends, consumers are also wishing for an in-person immersive shopping experience. According to Shopify, 35% of consumers are shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, while 24% want to interact with products before the purchase.

In the post-pandemic world, physical retail stores are making a comeback in a close partnership with their online avatars. According to the 2023 Connected Retail report, consumers are shopping at both online and physical stores, almost identically. An example is the online furniture brand Ikea which is adopting the omnichannel strategy. To this effect, the company launched its first omnichannel store in Canada in 2022.

With the increase in physical retail, direct-to-consumer brands have either seen a drop in profitability or a drop to the pre-pandemic levels. The 2023 McKinsey “State of Fashion” report explains this could be due to factors like reducing repeat purchases and customer loyalty. Going forward, these brands could opt for alternate revenue opportunities by partnering or integrating with third-party retailers or wholesalers.

Besides, more retail brands like Superdrugs, Walmart, and Macy’s are launching refreshed retail platforms to provide more choices to their consumers.

Challenges of Omnichannel in the eCommerce domain – and how to overcome them 

Despite its surging potential, the omnichannel approach has its share of implementation challenges. Most retailers continue to struggle to implement and leverage the full benefits of omnichannel.

Among the major challenges of omnichannel retail, companies fail to streamline and synchronize various functions including customer purchases, supply chain logistics, and order fulfillment. Retailers need a unified integrated approach to centralize each of these business functions.

Additionally, retailers do not understand the impact of customer behavior and user experience in the omnichannel journey. Be it through physical or digital channels, retailers need to seamlessly integrate the entire customer journey right from their first visit to the eCommerce (or physical) store to their first purchase and order fulfillment.

To provide a unified shopping experience, retailers must acquire the right technology and integration capabilities. For instance, an integrated commerce platform can seamlessly process an online order and deliver the ordered product to a physical store for pick-up. Most retailers are at varying levels of technological maturity to deliver a consistent user experience.

In the age of personalization, retail customers also expect a personalized shopping experience and messaging from their preferred brands. Considering its benefits, a personalized omnichannel strategy can help retain existing customers. The challenge is how to deliver the right message or campaign to the customer at the right time and place. This requires retailers to understand and track the performance of their various channels and marketing campaigns. For customized messaging, retailers need to map out individual buyers’ journeys and determine which channel is the best fit at every stage of the customer journey.

Conclusion

In 2024 and beyond, an efficient omnichannel strategy is not only desirable but essential to the business success of retail companies. As outlined in this article, omnichannel is changing the dynamics of the global eCommerce sector. To survive and thrive in this market, retailers must embrace the “digital-first” experience through the capabilities of a digital commerce solution.

At Recode Solutions, we enable our retail customers to realize business value by investing in eCommerce solutions. Apart from digital commerce, our integration services enable you to modernize your existing systems. Here’s a recent case study of how a U.S.-based retailer used our integration services to:

• Reduce their shipping costs by 20%.
• Improve customer acquisitions by 15%.

Our team of technical professionals can help you optimize your omnichannel initiative. If you want to know more, contact our team today!