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By Tom Groenfeldt
To hear technologists at the Big Show -- the retailing industry's annual technology event, held recently in New York -- most retailing operations are in the very early stages of making their Web sites and their physical stores work well together.
According to Kevin Moffitt, VP of strategy and customer experience at CrossView, a vendor that specializes in the area, most stores are at level 1 on a scale of 10.
In a typical retail Web operation, customers spend time looking for merchandise on the Web site, but that interest is rarely communicated to a store. "They are often entirely separate organizations," said Moffitt.
That made sense when online selling was new -- a separate organization probably was needed to tackle the technology and adapt quickly to rapidly changing capabilities. Now, however, many customers are mixing Internet research and in-store sales, or buying over the Web site and picking up the goods at a nearby outlet.
Stores need to improve their Web experience and provide better integration with their brick-and-mortar locations, said Moffitt, who was previously the director of e-commerce operations and development at Circuit City, which went out of business early last year despite being a pioneer on the Web. Sixty-six percent of Web shoppers abandon their shopping carts when asked to enter their credit card details, and 75 percent of the people who called Circuit City were on the store's Web site at the same time they were on the phone, but the customer service rep in the call center had no way to see what they were looking at.
Now, some of the better retailing Web sites offer click-to-chat by instant message or phone, and the call center rep can see what a browser is looking at on the store Web site. By asking the right questions, the rep can follow the customer's interests on the Web and try to up-sell or cross-sell. Circuit City, which started in-store pickup of Web orders at the suggestion of someone in IT, saw fully half its online orders delivered through stores. Customers like the immediate gratification and saving the shipping charges.
For stores, the pickup by a well-informed customer who has spent time on the Web site offers excellent potential for further selling. Stores could offer discount certificates when an order is placed for in-store delivery.
When customers arrive at the store, they often buy accessories or CDs or DVDs as well. But not only is the technology not integrated between the Web organization and the store, but incentives within the retail organization are often separate so the store managers don't receive credit for purchases made online even though they handle fulfillment.
"You have the potential for a big win when you can set up systems to support all the channels," said Moffitt. CrossView works on IBM's WebSphere Commerce platform and integrates to legacy systems.
Another way to improve retailing IT integration is by providing in-store kiosks that present the content shoppers can find on the Web site, including user reviews and the ability to send a potential purchase to Facebook or announce it on Twitter to see if friends approve.
John Stelzer, director of retail industry marketing for AT&T subsidiary Sterling Commerce, said his company's software is built on the assumption customers will use multiple channels, so it can maintain a buyer's information from any channel -- handy for shoppers who are working from a mobile phone and lose their connection in a tunnel, or buyers who get called to dinner when their cart is just about full. Sterling will maintain the selections for them.
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