The emergence of omnichannel retail has intensified the competition between new-age direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands and traditional global enterprises. It’s no more about how long you have been in the industry, but the values your brand stands for and how well you understand your customer’s changing preferences. 

Despite recent supply chain challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic has been good to the U.S. e-commerce market. Stay-at-home orders drove brands to build or accelerate their D2C fulfillment operations, and many profited from the boom in online shopping.  

Still, brick-and-mortar retail is far from dead. Customers value sensory aspects of physical shopping, and a growing number of stores are adding microfulfillment operations to facilitate curbside pickup or faster last-mile delivery. This omnichannel, “phygital” approach — when paired with a strong D2C channel — offers a seamless brand experience.

Merchandising in the Cloud

Delivering a cohesive phygital shopping experience requires the right technology adoption for processing real-time insights. Integrating cloud computing not only reduces costs but simplifies workflow, improves efficiency and end-user experience. 

Cloud forms the backbone of all e-commerce and D2C brands — enabling scalability, security and data analytics capabilities that make businesses more responsive to changing customer preferences. A unified shopping experience demands merchandising on the cloud to drive sales across multiple channels simultaneously. It empowers retailers to:

• Maintain all store information in a single place, so it’s easier to analyze and track market shifts, monitor competitor trends, and discover innovative ways to capture emerging trends
• View 100% inventory on one platform to build unique, unified and interactive planograms for reducing costs on merchandising activities and increasing productivity
• Track 100% inventory with serialization across the length of the supply chain, in the warehouse and stores, so nothing gets lost or misplaced
• Capture real-time insights on retail execution and sales performance for greater flexibility in decision-making that helps take immediate action on changing demand patterns
• Automate reordering/ replacement of stocks from nearest possible location, warehouse or stores, to prevent loss in sales opportunities and higher demand realization
• Achieve faster order fulfillment from the nearest location for higher customer satisfaction with minimum efforts, to create a memorable shopping experience
• Make smarter decisions with advanced analytics on team performance and store-level execution, all tailored to specific business needs at the individual stakeholder level
• Design a competitive dynamic pricing strategy to capitalize on the changing customer demand, at the store level, and adapt to the evolving trends
• Facilitate faster hassle-free returns processing for rapid re-commerce, in the primary or secondary market, so maximum inventory is sold in the shortest time
• Prevent unnecessary expenditure on infrastructure as they are built on a pay per use model

Stores of the future will be integrated with technologies like virtual reality, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to allow customers an interactive, immersive experience with the products. As customers connect with brands at multiple levels, a D2C retail strategy will help brands evaluate valuable data and take appropriate measures to build brand loyalty that usually gets masked on multi-brand marketplaces. With the holiday season around the corner, retailers must capitalize on the D2C and omnichannel growth to take data-driven and customer-centric decisions.

Anshuman Agarwal is co-founder of Increff.