E-commerce has become ubiquitous. It was already flourishing when the COVID-19 pandemic boosted it even more. Customers have become used to being able to order products anywhere, anytime.
Omnichannel has become a strategic issue. Retailers with online and offline presence can leverage this duality as an advantage before online-only peers. Also, there are many channels: Online may be split into web, mobile, app, and marketplace channels, offline into stores, retail partners, franchises, and more.
Customers now demand a seamless experience across all those channels. This includes applications such as:
- Browsing a store and placing an order through a website
- Receiving personalized recommendations
- Checking in-store stock availability through an app
- Ordering in-store for home delivery
- Monitoring the order status, downloading a receipt, or asking for support independent of which channels were used for the transaction
This drives the importance of data exchange and processes across an organization, including breaking up the boundaries of ERP systems, webshops, and logistics.
Modern organizations embrace a decentralized, decoupled approach to facilitating processes, sharing data between services, and for analytics purposes. Webshops may access in-store stock information from the ERP system. POS cashier software may use centralized customer data to register a sale with a single customer record. When the webshop service owner turns their transaction data into a data product, such as transaction histories for customers or regions, anyone and any service across the organization may consume and compose such data for their purposes, including recommendation engines.
There is an Advantage Gap as legacy systems are often not ready for decentralized, modern software and information architectures. Learn how CID’s Advantage Engineers help retail unlock the value of microservices and data mesh to become more efficient and make omnichannel work.
