How do I use retail & omnichannel for ecommerce?

The rush to omnichannel has created the false impression that it’s a checklist—BOPIS, check; curbside, check; mobile app, check. This is wrong. True omnichannel is a fundamental shift in business strategy, not a list of features. It’s about creating a coherent and unified system where your online and physical channels make each other more valuable, creating a whole that is more resilient and profitable than the sum of its parts. The goal isn't to be everywhere, but to be consistent and connected everywhere you choose to be.

The real problem isn't a technical one of 'connecting stores to the internet.' The real problem is strategic and operational. It’s about breaking down the silos between your ecommerce team, your marketing team, and your (future or current) retail team. The conversation has matured beyond the reactive measures we saw during the pandemic. On Retail Remix, the discussion has shifted from simply offering services to orchestrating them efficiently. It's about how the physical and digital retail spaces continue to blend into a 'phygital' experience, a term Jackie Mulligan of ShopAppy uses to describe blurring the lines between the two worlds. The operational goal is a Unified Customer Experience where the brand feels like one entity, regardless of touchpoint.

Start with Partnerships, Not Palaces

For most ecommerce brands, the idea of opening a flagship store is a disastrously expensive fantasy. The smart, modern playbook for entering physical retail is to start with partnerships. On eCommerce MasterPlan, Monica Ferguson explains how she grew The Sole Mates to a seven-figure brand by strategically adding Amazon and wholesale channels alongside her Shopify DTC store. This is one of the most effective Hybrid Retail Strategies. Wholesale allows you to enter hundreds of 'showrooms' at once, leveraging the existing foot traffic and credibility of established retailers. It lets you test new geographic markets, learn the cadence of B2B relationships, and get your product into customers' hands—all without the crippling capital expense and operational headache of signing a lease and building out a store.

When you do create your own physical footprint, think of it less as a point of sale and more as a piece of media. Nikki Baird made a great point on Retail Remix about the shift from transactional to experiential retail. Your physical space is where you can host events, offer personalization services, and allow customers to interact with your products and staff in a way that’s impossible online. The staff in this environment, armed with tablets and full access to the online catalog, are not cashiers; they are stylists, brand ambassadors, and clienteling experts. The sale they influence might happen online a week later, and your attribution model needs to account for that. The primary ROI of a physical location is not the four-wall revenue. It's brand building, content generation, and increased Customer Lifetime Value across your entire ecosystem.

Of course, none of this works if your technology is a mess of patched-together systems. As Jason Goldberg and Scot Wingo frequently hammer home on The Jason & Scot Show, you cannot provide a seamless customer experience with a fragmented, legacy tech stack. If your store's POS system doesn't have real-time access to your central warehouse inventory (and vice versa), your attempt at omnichannel will create more customer frustration than it solves. This is why the conversation is elevating from omnichannel to Unified Commerce, which requires a single platform for managing customers, inventory, and orders across all touchpoints. Guests like Kelly Goetsch have explored how modern architectures using microservices or composable commerce are making this more achievable, allowing brands to pick the best tools for each job without creating new data silos.

The Hard Part Most People Miss

Executing this is harder than it sounds, and the second-order effects are what trip most brands up. First, inventory complexity is a massive operational challenge. True real-time synchronization is the holy grail, but it's technically and financially demanding. Without it, you risk disappointing customers by selling an item online that just sold out in-store. Second, a poorly executed strategy creates more organizational silos, not fewer. You end up with separate data pools for online behavior, in-store purchases, and mobile app usage, with no way to connect them to see that it's all the same customer. The challenge Noam Paransky faced at Tapestry was likely not just about digital tools, but about unifying data and strategy across multiple iconic brands and channels.

Ultimately, your org chart must reflect your customer journey. If your Head of Ecommerce and your Head of Retail have separate P&Ls and competing incentives, your omnichannel strategy is doomed from the start. They will optimize for their own channel at the expense of the overall customer experience. Your business needs to be restructured around the customer, with shared goals and shared data.

Your First 90 Days

How do you start? You don't begin by signing a lease or hiring a Head of Retail. You begin with small, deliberate steps to gather data.

Day 1-30: Audit and Analyze. For one month, your only job is to listen and learn. Map your current customer journey from first touch to final purchase. Where are the friction points? Where do they drop off? Use your e-commerce analytics to identify geographic clusters of your best customers. This isn't just trivia; this is a treasure map that shows you where physical retail demand is likely highest. Most importantly, actually talk to 15-20 of your customers. Ask them where else they shop, what their last great retail experience was, and how they'd like to interact with your brand in the real world.

Day 31-60: Launch a Low-Risk Experiment. Armed with your data, run a small-scale 'retail' test designed for maximum learning at minimal cost. This is not the time to open a store. It could be a simple weekend pop-up shop in one of the geographic clusters you identified. It could be a booth at a local market. Or, following Monica Ferguson's lead, it could be a focused effort to land your product in five to ten independent boutiques in a key city. You'll learn invaluable lessons about visual merchandising, in-person pricing, and the sheer logistics of moving physical products.

Day 61-90: Build the Technology Roadmap. You've now audited your digital experience and run a physical world test. You have real data. Now you can make an informed decision about what comes next. What was the biggest bottleneck you discovered? Was it managing inventory for the pop-up? Was it an inability to capture customer information in person and sync it with your CRM? Based on these learnings, you can build a technology and strategic roadmap. Perhaps the clear next step is expanding your wholesale program. Or maybe the data points toward investing in a platform that unifies your online store with Shopify POS to support a series of more ambitious pop-ups. You're no longer guessing; you're building a strategy from the ground up, based on real customer behavior.