Forget showrooming, a new report suggests that consumers are more into webrooming – that is, researching products online or on mobile before purchasing in-store. L2’s Intelligence Report: Omnichannel, created in partnership with RichRelevance, examines the efforts of 100 retailers to drive customers from clicks to bricks and back again.

Findings include: 50 per cent of offline retail sales will touch digital channels by September 2014; Of the 100 brands tracked in the study, only six per cent have real-time inventory visibility online while 26 per cent offer in-store pick-up; Gucci is the only brand in the luxury category to launch in-store inventory visibility since the 2013 study, making it and Tourneau the only luxury retailers able to lay claim to this; Just five retailers (Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, Home Depot, Sears and Walmart) leverage the information stored to a consumer’s account in order to seamlessly deliver in-store inventory information; Of the eight department stores benchmarked in the study, 75 per cent provide inventory visibility – Barney’s and Bergdorf Goodman are the only holdouts; Retailers such as Macy’s and Coach that are deploying omnichannel strategies are seeing growth that surpasses Amazon due to their leveraging of stores as assets.

“Omnichannel success requires retailers to use technology and data to deliver real value to shoppers in terms of convenience, experience and connection. There is a sea change occurring in retail as merchants tap into personalisation, location data and new devices to deliver real-time experiences that support the shopper in her goals,” says Diane Kegley, CMO, RichRelevance

Share Story: