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Retail e-commerce sales continued their steady growth this holiday season, with economic factors like the price of gas leading to consumers' choice to shop from home. While online sales account for a relatively small percentage (5% to 7%, depending on the source) of overall retail sales, growth of the e-commerce channel has been outpacing the growth of any other retail sales channel for the past few years. This makes e-commerce an important focus area for retailers and one where there is generally much room for improvement.

Your most loyal, savvy, and profitable consumers are also those in the demographic that's most likely to shop online. They have disposable income, they have high-speed Internet access, and they know how to use it. But they're also very demanding, and if your approach is too rigid, they'll find an online retailer that's easier to do business with. Key to pleasing the growing legions of Web-savvy consumers is inventory and marketing uniformity across all your sales channels. Shoppers will remain loyal if they get the seamless experience they expect, whether they're in your brick-and-mortar store, cruising your Web site, thumbing through your catalog, chatting with a CSR (customer service representative) in your call center, or browsing your wares at a kiosk.

Integrated Systems Create Seamless Experiences
The number of tier-one retailers that can't support a seamless shopping experience floors me. The multichannel mantra says I, the consumer, should be able to get anything I want, any time I want it, anywhere I am. Yet time and again, retailers make it difficult for consumers to get merchandise that's in a different store or stockpile. For instance, I recently set out to purchase a large gift online from one of the nation's leading department stores. The retailer's site said the item I was looking for was not in stock online. I called the retailer and asked it to try locating the item in its inventory system. It did locate the item, at a store 300 miles from my house. The CSR I spoke to refused to ship it to me at the price listed on the retailer's Web site. This retailer's brick-and-mortar inventory, pricing, and merchandising systems are run completely separately from its Web inventory, pricing, and merchandising systems. From a business perspective, you can rattle off several reasons why this might be the case. From a consumer's perspective, it's cumbersome, difficult to deal with, and unacceptable.

Modern solutions from multichannel retail-centric ERP (enterprise resource planning) companies help retailers create a seamless multichannel customer experience. They help manage online and offline content, combine disparate inventory databases, and improve the fluidity of merchandise movement to meet customer demand regardless of order origin. Further, they can help you follow up on the effectiveness of your seamless channels by measuring marketing effectiveness. I had the pleasure of meeting with two such companies - Junction Solutions and Ecometry - this year at the eTail East and Shop.Org conferences. You'll see more coverage of these companies and others like them beginning with the January 2006 issue of Integrated Solutions For Retailers. We'll be making a concerted effort to cover e-commerce solutions more frequently and in more detail than ever before. We've added a multichannel retailing line item to our editorial calendar and will attempt to bring you at least one multichannel retailing success story every month. Do you have one to share? Drop me a note at mattp@corrypub.com, and tell me about it.