Omnichannel

Petco, a leading pet specialty retailer, deployed LP Insights to aggregate and analyze data from multiple customer touchpoints as well as gain a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiment across the online and in-store experience. Erin Smith, Petco's director of customer care, shares the retailer's success story.

Improving the cross-channel customer experience and optimizing the supply chain ranked as retailers' biggest challenges in a new study by Oracle. The report also found that mobile access is key: Forty percent of retailers said that providing store associates with mobile access to customer, product, inventory and other information is critical to their business, along with providing the entire organization with a more consistent and complete view of the customer (40%).

The seller-oriented marketplace of today will soon be the antiquated site of tomorrow, replaced by a new wave of marketplaces built as a community focused on buyers. This will have profound effects on the way things are bought and sold online, as well as how the retail industry reaches consumers. Welcome to the age where consumers make their intentions known by posting what they want instead of what they're selling, where sellers go to the buyer instead of the other way around and where trust is paramount. Welcome to the age of the buyer's marketplace.

Online-only and multichannel retailers both expect growth in the next year, according to new research from Eccomplish, which found about 73 percent of them are anticipating growing revenues anywhere between 1 and 20 percent. That compares with the 79 percent of multichannel retailers who expect the same growth, according to managementtoday.com

Despite rampant showrooming concerns, a new study finds smartphones "contributing to — not taking away from — in-store sales," with smartphone shoppers 14 percent more likely to convert and make a purchase in the store than nonsmartphone users. According to the Mobile Influence Factor study from Deloitte Consulting, through activities such as product research, price comparison and other mobile application use, smartphones currently influence 5.1 percent of annual retail store sales, translating into $159 billion in forecasted sales for 2012. 

As part of the company's Smarter Commerce marketing effort, IBM is investigating the possibility of using augmented reality (AR) to help retailers provide more product information to their customers, as well as to gather more information about customers. The company's research labs have designed a prototype of a mobile application that can be used by store goers to identify products and retrieve more information about potential products. The company is testing it now with a number of retailers.

Best Buy announced Tuesday it's expanding the Best Buy Mobile brand and store-within-a-store concept into 14 five-star stores throughout Nanjing, China, this summer. The expansion of Best Buy Mobile into the Chinese market is the first evolution of Global Connect, a partnership that was formed in November 2011 between Best Buy and Carphone Warehouse. "The launch of Best Buy Mobile in China is a true global effort,” said Shari Ballard, president, international for Best Buy. 

Over 200 branded manufacturers and 1,300 retailers answered surveys to determine the effectiveness of retail-integrated e-commerce, and the results are clear: 73 percent of the brands surveyed stated that retail-integrated e-commerce increased their overall sales — both online and in-store.

Three years after eBay gave up on a B-to-B product-sourcing site, it's testing a similar model again. eBay has been pilot testing an invitation-only marketplace for top-rated sellers where it offers them wholesale "deals" from preselected wholesalers, brands, liquidators and distributors. Every week, eBay Wholesale Deals runs offers for wholesale merchandise in a range of categories including electronics, home and garden, fashion, and more. 

Global beauty retailer Sephora is taking the lead in integrating online and retail shopping experiences. As Sephora Direct senior vice president Julie Bornstein told Forbes last month, "lots of retailers are hesitant to bridge the online and offline world," but Sephora is embracing the opportunity.