Retail Systems Research (RSR) analyst Nikki Baird wrote a great column for last week’s issue of RSR’s Retail Paradox Weekly. In her post, she predicts 2016 will be a breakout year for consumer-held mobile retail apps, that the term omni-channel will continue to fall out of favor, and that the IoT will prove a disruptive force on retail this year.
On the omni-channel point, Baird takes caution. While she acknowledges that many in the vendor community are ‘over it’ and espousing that view on retailers, she rightfully claims, “Omni-channel is not dead. It’s not ‘over’ – we are not living in a post-omni-channel retail world by any means.”
I agree, and I think the haste to ban “omni-channel” from the retail lexicon is a product of a couple of factors, chief among them the nuanced sticky points in its loose definition and the premature declaration of unified commerce on the part of many in the vendor community.
Theoretically, if a merchant can run a commerce platform that ties together, at a minimum, all the dynamics of any-channel inventory availability/fulfillment (and all the supply chain implications that creates) and all the dynamics of customer identification and purchase history across all channels, I suppose that retailer has moved beyond the pursuit of omni-channel. I suppose they’re simply doing commerce in the modern age. If that were happening, it might be a tidy time to retire the term omni-channel.
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