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What is Multichannel Retail?

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What is Multichannel Retail?

What is Multichannel Retail?

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List of contents :

    1.  What is multichannel retail?

    2 . Factors of Transition to Multichannel Retail

    3.  Advantages of Multichannel Retail

    4 . Challenges of Multichannel Retail

    5.  Online E-Commerce Channels

What is Multichannel Retail?

The Multichannel is a retail model born of the digital revolution. Retailers who adopt the strategy will offer customers the opportunity to purchase their products through both online and offline channels.

Multichannel retail can be defined as the process of selling a product through more than one channel; It can include shops, catalogs, e-commerce sites, and other channels. The more the channels, higher the amount of profit, and this type of sale includes at least one physical store, in addition to at least one online store, and statistics have proven that this method increases the percentage of Sales.

Factors of Transition to Multichannel Retail

There are many factors and reasons that contributed to the trend of a large number of merchants moving to the multi-channel retail process, the most important of which are:

  • Increasing productivity, and thus obtaining a greater amount of net profit.
  • Increase profits and income for each worker, and increase the number of employment opportunities.
  • Increasing the quantity of the product in the market.
  • Improving the customer’s experience with the product.
  • Expanding customer base.

Advantages of Multichannel Retail

The multichannel retail process has many advantages that contribute to the demand of merchants, which mainly aims to attract a larger number of customers, then gain and maintain their trust, which contributes to obtaining more profits.  a multichannel strategy is more flexible and convenient for consumers to purchase goods or services, which promotes a significant increase in sales. Another advantage of this strategy is that it offers 24-hour access to the customer, which helps to preserve the brand. Retailers also benefit from multichannelling to improve analysis to understand consumer behavior, as it is imperative to create a personalized customer experience in the digital age. The most important of these features are:

  • Improving client expectations and gaining his trust and satisfaction.
  • Providing a unified identity for the product through all channels, which helps the customer to access it from anywhere.
  • Standardization of prices and promotions across all sales channels.
  • Collect customer information for use in the marketing process, and target each category of customers when marketing the product they need.
  • Enhancing productivity, increasing sales, and achieving greater profit, in addition to a greater presence in new sales channels.

Multichannel Retail challenges

Despite all the advantages of multichannel retail, merchants face more than one challenge that may hinder them from achieving their goals.

The financial benefits of multichannel sales make retailers jump into this battle without fully understanding how it actually works. As the order volume increases, the complexity is also proportional to it. In fact, most retailers don’t think their current systems have enough features to optimize operations and handle multi-order requests.

When intending to expand into new sales channels, businesses or individual sellers must prepare inventory to serve customers. The more channels of sale, the more important inventory accuracy becomes, which requires visibility and control over your warehouse locations across different channels and warehouse locations. Retailers find it difficult to handle purchases through various channels or struggle with order fulfillment and fast delivery.

An important part of multichannel selling is the ability to process orders seamlessly and quickly. Customers are increasingly picky in shopping choices, they will be loyal to services with a smooth and streamlined order processing process. Enterprises without sufficient resources and high technology will find it difficult to meet the speed of e-commerce trends.

Having a presence across multiple unintegrated channels is a challenge for retailers who can’t fulfill online orders through their brick-and-mortar stores.

In addition, this business model also causes difficulties in measurement analysis due to collection of data from separate channels, leading to an inefficient strategy.

Online E-commerce channels

Those interested in multi-channel retail, when they turn to the electronic part of the process, can choose one of the most important channels to achieve maximum outreach, namely:

Social media: Many people tend to build their business completely through social media, and take advantage of the advertising channels that these sites provide, such as: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter; As it has made the selling process easier for companies, by adding a Buy Now button, which helps customers submit orders directly from posts and images within the site. It is more easy and convenient for consumers, and does not require leaving the site they are browsing, whether through computer, or smart phone applications.

E-markets: At first if the merchant does not have his own website for the e-commerce process, he can still benefit from many customers who are constantly browsing commercial websites, such as: Amazon, eBay; It provides a large number of additional customers, in addition to a greater amount of profits.

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