These days, it's widely assumed that most businesses are selling directly to customers via the internet. However, surprisingly, a Grant Thornton survey found that 39 percent of businesses are not yet selling online. Online sales might seem like a dream come true "” you reach larger markets with no middlemen, at higher margins "” but, according to the Grant Thornton survey, the dream can easily turn into a nightmare.

Walmart's second quarter sales climbed 2.1 percent to $68.7bn, driven by omnichannel investments in ecommerce logistics, updated mobile applications, expanded online inventory, products available for pick-up in store and rolling out fulfillment capabilities to an increasing number of supercenters.

Analyst Insight: Multichannel fulfillment can be defined as optimizing the supply chain's capabilities to simultaneously receive and process orders from multiple ordering channels and fulfill them from the source that provides the highest level of consumer satisfaction and lowest fulfillment cost to the retailer. This model for fulfillment is both customer - and cost-driven and, therefore, the new de facto standard for the retail supply chain. - Joe Vernon, Manager of North America Supply Chain Technologies, Capgemini