Omnichannel

Outdoor equipment retailer Cabela's has seen a big payoff from upping its brick-and-mortar presence and moving away from its roots as a cataloger. While Cabela's traces its roots to selling outdoor gear via its iconic catalog, its growing base of retail stores have become popular destinations for outdoor enthusiasts looking to stock up on hunting, fishing, camping and related gear. It's not unusual for thousands of consumers to line up hours before Cabela's opens the doors to a new store for the first time, says Chief Financial Officer Ralph Castner.

CrossView, a cross-channel commerce solutions and retail technology provider, announced key results from a recent study that found cross-channel consistency and superior customer service are two of the most powerful assets to help retailers win against the looming threat of showrooming. The study found that the most successful retailers focus on the fundamentals such as buy online, pick up in-store and consistent, transparent pricing and promotions.

Quiksilver recently launched e-commerce sites in 10 countries over just a few months’ time. The outdoor sports lifestyle retailer's use of the Demandware cloud-based e-commerce platform made possible rapid rollouts of sites in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. "Quiksilver had a very aggressive market expansion strategy and we needed a platform that would allow us to roll out multiple sites across geographies in a fast, efficient way," said Quiksilver's Senior Vice President of Digital Nicolas Foulet in a statement. 

Last December, at the height of the Christmas shopping season, Amazon.com aggressively promoted its price-checking mobile phone application by giving shoppers 5 percent off items on Amazon that they scanned while in brick-and-mortar stores. The application, which compares store prices with Amazon's, brought the practice of showrooming — already very familiar to retail store clerks — out of store aisles and into public prominence.

Retail survey results released by CashStar indicate that retailers have not only recognized the importance of offering e-gifts, they have significant plans to expand these offerings this year. The vast majority of retailers believe e-gifts are a successful tool in building loyalty with their customers. Nearly half plan to improve their mobile shopping experience in time for the fast-approaching holiday season.

Build-A-Bear Workshop announced that it's introducing a newly imagined store design in six markets across the U.S. in 2012. The new store design, which has been over two years in the making, merges the Build-A-Bear Workshop's hands-on bear-making process with technology to enhance the customer experience. “I'm very excited about the enhanced features that will allow us to continue to lead in the interactive retail space,” said Maxine Clark, founder and chief executive bear of Build-A-Bear Workshop.

Info Retail, an Atlanta-based strategy and design agency focusing on the control and simplification of buying experiences, released findings from its recent Retail Integration Survey. The findings revealed that millennials rely on brick-and-mortar stores and technology equally to access information or to gain insights about a product they plan to purchase. Millennials (age 18-35) were twice as likely to use technology to learn about products as consumers over 35 years old. 

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.