Oh how in all walks of life, but especially business and technology, we love a new phrase. An utterance or word that has not yet been coined that means something different and it is meant to replace an older term or phrase that has become a little passé. Struggling for examples, well look at the technology term ‘cloud’ on the fair pages of Cybertill’s company website we offer an explanation of what cloud is and how it is remarkably similar to meanings for Software as a Service (SaaS) and Application Service Provider (ASP).
But I digress in retail there is the phrase omni-channel. Now this is a relatively recent phenomenon (the author of this blog has been aware of it for around 18 months but cannot remember where and when they first saw or heard it). Although when you look on Wikipedia the phrase Omni-channel Retailing was first added in March 2011. But it is not everyday language. And it loosely means retailers selling seamlessly through their sales channels (their stores, ecommerce and mail order). Hhhhmmmm sounds remarkably like multi-channel retailing?
This blog two years ago argued (admittedly without much success) that multi-channel retailing should really be called cross-channel retailing. So what differentiates omni-channel and multi-channel? Well, there is a subtle difference. Multi-channel was coined when retailers sold through multiple channels, such as stores and catalogues (catalogues do you remember those?). Then along came ecommerce and multi-channel became common parlance. But there is no one true definition of multi-channel retailing, so you can infer different meanings of the word. To some multi-channel means selling seamlessly across multiple sales channels to others it means selling across multiple sales channels. However omni-channel retailing intentionally means seamlessly selling across multiple sales channels.
Although there can be no argument about the future of retail in that successful retailers will need to have a single view of customers, inventory and orders across their sales channels. And the channel is for the customer to decide. So the future of retailing is omni-channel…or multi-channel (or even as the blogger once argued cross-channel). Well, I’m glad that’s cleared that up.
