White Paper: E-Commerce: More Than Just An E-Store

When the first e-commerce site was introduced many years ago, it was heralded as the new way of doing business. Predictions of the demise of the retail store were everywhere. Doom was the dominate theme when conversation came to the traditional retail mall. After all, why would anyone go to a mall when they could simply ‘click' and have the product delivered? Fortunately for most retailers, these dire predictions held nothing of substance, but they did provide a warning about change that would have a dramatic affect on the ways retailers sold products to customers.

Early internet retailers were ‘virtual retailers', unencumbered with physical stores or legacy software systems. They were able to quickly provide their online customers with product information, competitive pricing, and reasonable delivery options. Consumers liked it. On the other hand, retailers that operated traditional stores and were early adopters of internet retailing faced a significant problem in this regard. They had existing systems, but no way of integrating those batch environments into the real-time world of the internet. Getting a realistic view of what inventory was available at a store at any given moment was guesswork at best.

Today, customers are expecting to be able to see real-time inventory availability from the web site. Walking into a store, they expect the retailer to have stock available if the web site indicated there was a quantity on hand. Having mobile devices capable of browsing the web from anywhere, it is quite likely the customer was able to check inventory availability while sitting in their car in the parking lot of the retailer. Sophisticated retailers are integrating all of their inventory positions throughout the enterprise. They are also integrating the web customers and ‘bricks and mortar' customers. They have retired the old batch systems, and moved to real-time systems to carry them down the road of on-demand information.