As consumers emerge from the pandemic, their new online shopping behaviors are merging with their pre-pandemic traditional shopping habits.1 This more modernized approach combines digital and physical channels, forcing merchants to move to an omnichannel strategy or risk being left behind.
Case in point: online ordering and curbside pickup, have both seen a marked increase in recent years.2 An important byproduct of this new behavior is that 47% of those who pick up their online orders on location end up making additional purchases either often or every time they pick up an eCommerce purchase in-store, according to The 2022 Global Digital Shopping Index U.S. Edition, a Cybersource and PYMNTS collaboration.
Merchants with the right systems and processes in place can capitalize on this and other rapidly forming omnichannel preferences with higher average order values, more in-store traffic and greater customer satisfaction.3 But many merchants lack these systems or try to piece together multiple systems that don’t allow them to provide the seamless omnichannel experience customers now demand.
There is a better way.
Finding the right omnichannel partner
Merchants must find an omnichannel commerce partner that can unite information across the enterprise, converging front-end sales with back-end supply chain execution in a single solution while also providing the personalized convenience that customers want.
What does that entail? Here is our checklist of five must-have features when looking for a partner:
1. Inventory & Fulfillment
- Search across the entire network and filter by any attribute of an item
- Global inventory visibility among all locations
- Dynamic views for real-time pickup and delivery options
2. Payment flexibility
- Add upsell/cross-sell opportunities during order pickup directly to the original order in a single receipt
- Multiple payment types within a single transaction
- Mobile checkout with support for contactless payments and shared payment terminals
- Unified omnichannel cart where orders initiated in any channel can be completed, returned or exchanged in any other channel
3. Employee tools
- Dashboards, insights and notifications to simplify tasks
- Single application for in-store selling, engagement and fulfillment
4. Customer preferences
- Engaging customers where and when they choose
- Enabling self-service for digital natives
5. 360-view of your customers
- Access your customer’s transactions and interactions across your channels
- Intuitive insights into your customer’s history, trends and preferences
This checklist can seem daunting to a merchant, but it is achievable—even in a single app—with partners that specialize in ecommerce integration and payments. Merchants should choose partners that can power all of their activities from the moment a customer decides they want to purchase an item to the moment it is picked up or shipped.
It is no longer optional for merchants to use just brick-and-mortar tactics. Today, merchants need to consider a comprehensive omnichannel strategy that includes robust technology solutions to drive both top-line growth and bottom-line profitability.
1 Cybersource.com. “Three ways US merchants differ from global peers center on omnichannel experience,” May 13, 2022.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
