Omnichannel

J.C.Penney is set to launch two new online retail businesses this summer — Gifting Grace and CLAD — thanks to a marketing partnership the retailer formed with Hearst Magazines. The goal? To gain a significant share of consumers' growing e-commerce spend.

As we ring in a new year, many retailers are wondering what's in store for 2011. With an economy that's still bouncing back from the Great Recession, it's hard to predict the future (yet we're going to try anyway). For many retailers, 2010 proved to be a year of recovery. They're hoping to continue down that path again this year. To help you get a feel for what lies ahead, Retail Online Integration surveyed leaders in the cross-channel and e-commerce retail space in the fall of last year to get their predictions for 2011. Here's what we learned.

With the traditional video game industry in decline, the world's largest video game retailer GameStop figured it would have a lot to lose. Rather than become a dinosaur in a fading industry, however, the Grapevine, Texas-based cross-channel retailer took a series of steps to adjust its business model to remain relevant in an evolving and dynamic marketplace. Chief among those steps was a shift to providing consumers with more digital content.

A new breed of shopper is emerging. Informed, empowered and always connected, this ultrasophisticated consumer demands real choice when it comes to selecting and purchasing goods. Unlike traditional multichannel shoppers, this consumer uses all channels — store, catalog, call center, web and mobile — simultaneously. Enter the omnichannel shopper.

Inferior live chat interactions provide no benefit and, in fact, can be worse than no live chat at all. In a way, it’s just good sense to do something well if you’re going to do it all. But website owners might be surprised to find out that they’re actively turning customers and prospects off if they don’t do live chat right.

New marketing vehicles such as the iPad bring cross-channel retailers innovative ways to reach consumers. But they also complicate life, making it a challenge to get a clear picture of which marketing activities are driving the most traffic to a website.

We're excited to offer you Retail Online Integration's 50 best tips of 2010. Our editorial staff reviewed every word published in our print publication, e-newsletter (The ROI Report) and website over the past year. From there, we've extracted the best money-making and cost-saving pointers. Enjoy.

Patient: "Doc, although we've got a good handle on our big-picture strategies, we keep getting off track in our execution. Our channel teams drift from what's said in our meetings; our timing is thrown off; our promos aren't all coordinated among our channels; our customers get hit with messages from all channels at once, then have a gap with no messages at all; and so on. Do you have any prescription to help us get and stay on track?"

The advent of new technologies has forever changed the way consumers shop. Today, consumers routinely research, purchase, ship and return products across all 
channels. They're using mobile devices, phones, websites, email, stores and catalogs in whichever combination is the most convenient for them.

One subject kept coming up repeatedly at session after session and on the trade show floor: quick response (QR) codes, those relatively boring 2-D codes that are suddenly very sexy and popular in the retail space.