Shoppers: The New Root Of The Omni-Channel Challenge

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

March 2016 Innovative Retail Technologies

This year’s retail imperative is once again omni-channel, but what was an 800-pound gorilla heading into 2015 looks more like a 400-pound orangutan this year.

For the past couple of years, the biggest omni-channel challenges were decidedly supply chain and fulfillment related; retailers gnashed their teeth over how to achieve enterprise-wide visibility into inventory, fine-tune supply chain dynamics to meet demand from multiple channels, and speed up fulfillment. Those are all process and technology related challenges, and for the most part, the tech vendor community has solved them all, if not in practice, then in theory. At this year’s massive NRF BIG Show, for instance, you couldn’t swing your show bag without hitting an exhibitor touting its “unified commerce platform.”