What you still don’t know about omnichannel

Today’s consumers are used to being online all the time, engaged in several different channels at once – like watching TV while browsing Facebook on their mobile. That’s why they expect a coherent and comprehensive experience while shopping. You may be surprised how many channels they use in one path to purchase – searching their products offline, ordering online and returning to a stationary shop. Below there is a table showing how many users connect these two main selling channels (online and offline) in one path:

Travel
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline (the sum of all buyers that combined online and offline)
7%	24%	31%
Computers
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
7%	17%	24%
Culture and entertainment
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
10%	20%	30%
Telecoms
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
6%	9%	15%
Household goods & electronics
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
6%	5%	11%
Fashion & sport
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
6%	9%	15%
Finance
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
2%	6%	8%
Cosmetics and pharmaceuticals
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
2%	3%	5%
Motorization
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
2%	7%	9%
Furniture
ROPO	Reverse ROPO	Online & offline
7%	3%	10%

Data from ROPO SOPO report by Divante. Percentage share of buyers who completed the process in an ROPO or SOPO model and the sum of all buyers who combined online&offline.

What you may know

This seamless shopping experience is called omnichannel retailing. It is a consumer-centric approach and it’s considered to evolve. Retailers are in a transitional time where the speed of implementation can be differentiating and brand-building or slow response can be frustrating and damaging. Customers expect omnichannel retailing and become impatient waiting for it to become reality.

It seems to be ease as pie, yet everybody repeats: customers’ needs first. The reality is different:

70% of customers would like to check the availability of products on the website (also the availability in stationary shops) while only 35% of shops delivers this information in every selling channel. What’s more – 13% of customers declare, that won’t go to the stationary shops if they can’t check the availability online – to not go in vain.
50% of customers would like to order products online and collect them offline. Less than one-third of shops offers the simplified Click&Collect model.

What you don’t know

Though it seems to be true, a great number of touchpoints and adding new features aren’t the base of omnichannel. Surprised? However, it may seem that more points of touch mean better omnichannel experience, it doesn’t. The core is integrations between included systems.

Integrations ensure real-time experience and enable scalability of a business model. They must be able to share data and operate in a unified manner in response to a set of common business requests. According to the standard approach, we must integrate almost every system with every other. ERP system needs to be notified about current orders from the online shop, B2B system, and send the order statuses. These orders must appear in a CRM system and, in case of modification, you need to create an integration that allows sending notifications in return.

It isn’t surprising that as a result, we have a very dense network, as with any new system the number of connections grows exponentially. How to overcome it? Implement an Enterprise Service Bus – a software architecture model used for designing and implementing communication between mutually interacting software applications. It enables format unification of the data that is being exchanged between systems and rerouting communication. For example, you only need to send the order information to one central point and the service bus spreads this messages to all the systems.

Why you need ESB?

What are the main advantages of this solution? Having an ESB module in your infrastructure, you can easily integrate any new system. In the same time, you reduce time and costs of such an integration – the number of integrations grows linearly, not exponentially.