E-commerce Insights: Multichannel Planning Is a Complex Endeavor

The irony is that increased ability to track orders and marketing due to the Web and technology advancements has cut the true understanding of response. The multichannel order allocation problem is far from solved. While the industry struggles to develop accurate methods for multichannel planning, try to expose and discuss your current order allocation rules. Don’t bury these assumptions deep in your business logic. Bring them to the forefront to determine if your strategic models are sensitive to these assumptions. They will be, and that’s terrifying. The “right” way to determine the true marketing drivers of customer behavior are ongoing, cross-channel, hold-out tests, which are difficult to design and implement, slow, and costly.