Hybrid Customer Era Requires Retail Recalibration.

There is a need for retailers to keep up with the pace of evolving consumer expectations, relates research from Manhattan Associates, Inc. Its report highlights a retail landscape where the lines between physical and digital commerce are becoming increasingly blurred.

Over the past decade, the retail industry has witnessed seismic structural shifts, as the sector transformed for the digital era and the pandemic upended shopping habits further. We are witnessing a period of evolution and recalibration, as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between physical and digital retail.

"Shopping habits have changed forever," says Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Manhattan Associates. "There can be no return to the status quo, with 83% of global retailers now claiming they operate a level of interconnection between their online and in-store functions.

"As the retail industry recalibrates for this next normal, the ability to navigate disruption, while enhancing the physical and digital customer experience, will become increasingly important, as will the technologies that allow retailers to fulfill in-store and online orders in an agile, sustainable, and profitable fashion."

When it comes to fulfillment, the "one size fits all" approach no longer works, and retailers are reacting to this.

'While the vast majority of globally surveyed retailers stated that they have a level of interconnection between their online and in-store functions, specifically in the U.S., only around half are offering buy in-store and return online or buy online and return in-store, and only three percent of U.S. retailers believe that they have an accurate overview of their inventory across their entire business--in-store and online--100% of the time," says Natalie Berg, analyst, author, and founder of NBK Retail.

"Shoppers today expect to shop on their own terms, with 80% considering the comfort of home delivery as the most important delivery method; 40% choosing click and collect; followed by contactless/curbside pickup at 34%. U.S. shoppers are also looking for instant gratification, with 30% considering same day home delivery very important. These findings highlight the importance of offering consumers choices when it comes to fulfillment options and the need for retailers to possess a single view of inventory, as keeping that all important customer promise just got a whole lot more complicated."

This clearly is in sync...