Historically, customer engagement and product fulfillment occurred in the same place â€" a traditional retail store. But today, retailers are beginning to explore how they can create opportunities for customers to engage with products in native environments. A related approach is to use nontraditional spaces for inventory storage, potentially speeding fulfillment. While it’s still early days, retailers should proactively consider these strategies’ potential risks and opportunities.

In today's fast-paced world of digital retailing, the ability to revise prices swiftly and on a large scale has emerged as a decisive differentiator for companies. Many retailers now track competitors' prices via systems that scrape rivals' websites and use this information as an input to set their own prices manually or automatically. A common strategy is to charge X dollars or X percent less than a target competitor. However, retailers that use such simple heuristics miss significant opportunities to fine-tune pricing. Some companies are now applying machine-learning models to guide their pricing decisions, but even these retailers tend to take an overly limited approach. They try to match or undercut competitors' prices without taking into account factors such as whether rivals are out of stock or how consumers make their purchasing decisions. In this article, the authors present a step-by-step process for dynamic pricing that focuses on building computer models that consider not just competitor pricing but also product availability and customer behavior to recommend optimal prices in real time.

Mirakl provided the technology and seller network required for companies like Macy's, Best Buy, Walmart, Siemens, or Carrefour to simply design, launch, and administer a marketplace that included products from third-party sellers. What began as a basic business idea in 2012 had grown into a thriving venture ten years later. Mirakl expected to grow its $100 million revenue by fivefold during the next five years. But how was this to be accomplished? Mirakl had previously prioritized the development of solutions for marketplace operators, the "Macy's of the world". It was now working on a new solution, Mirakl Connect, with the goal of becoming the premier destination for third-party sellers. But, how should Mirakl monetize these services? Should they charge for them, and if so, to whom? Should Mirakl explore adjacent opportunities, such as financial services, fulfillment, or advertising? Finally, should Mirakl expand its services to marketplaces outside the Mirakl ecosystem?

In October 2018, fashion, wellness, and beauty retailer Sylvarella implemented a Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPS) program in an attempt to counteract a sales decline. While BOPS had the potential to meet customer expectations for a seamless order and fulfillment experience, it also posed operational and financial risks. After six months, CEO Sylvia Coparella decided to meet with her vice president (VP) of store operations and VP of e-commerce to evaluate the impact that the program had on their respective departments, as well as the impact to the store overall. Coparella must decide whether to continue the program, continue the program with significant changes, or discontinue the program and instead adopt a different omnichannel retail model.

In April 2019, Sylvarella CEO Sylvia Coparella must assess the impact of the company's Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPS) program on her company's overall sales. To do so, she must review analyses of both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar sales data and compare the results to the company's sales prior to the program implementation. At the same time, she must consider the program's impact on intangible factors within her company, including organizational culture, equitable compensation, and employee morale. Coparella must determine whether to continue the BOPS program, continue the program with significant changes, or discontinue the program and instead implement a different omnichannel retail program.

In April 2019, Sylvia VP of Store Operations Axley Vega must review an analysis of her department's sales data to determine the impact of the company's Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPS) program. BOPS implementation created significant problems for the store operations team, including an increased workload for store associates without additional compensation, difficulties managing the fulfillment demands of the program, and declining customer satisfaction. As she prepares for a meeting with CEO Sylvia Coparella and VP of E-commerce Charla Limont, Vega must determine whether BOPS has helped or harmed her department. She must also decide whether to recommend the program continue, continue with significant changes, or discontinue.

In April 2019, Sylvarella VP of E-Commerce Charla Limont must review an analysis of her department's sales data to determine the impact of the company's Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPS) program. The program implementation created significant problems for the e-commerce team, including difficulties with the inventory management system, a high volume of abandoned shopping carts, and disgruntled social media influencers. As she prepares for a meeting with CEO Sylvia Coparella and VP of Store Operations Axley Vega, Limont must determine whether BOPS has helped or harmed her department. She must also decide whether to recommend the program continue, continue with significant changes, or discontinue.

Firms compete in an increasingly omnichannel environment. Customers no longer travel a single linear path but traverse a complex map invoking many channels, firm-owned and external, seamlessly through integrated technology. The associated changes in consumer behavior and the ways that firms engage consumers have led many to reshape the way they innovate their product portfolios. This article presents a structured overview of some of the most striking changes to firms' new product development (NPD) processes in B2C settings. Enlisting the classic NPD funnel, it describes how the omnichannel environment and its technologies affect speed and execution in each development stage. It illustrates key changes with examples from packaged goods, consumer technology, and fashion.

As they fight for survival in the era of online shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting costs by slashing head count and budgets for training. But that erodes their biggest edge over e-tailers: a live person customers can talk to face-to-face. For every dollar a retailer saves on staffing, it may be losing several dollars in revenues and gross profits if customers leave stores empty-handed because they can't find a knowledgeable salesperson to help them. The solution lies in optimizing staffing and training for each store, but most retailers don't know how to do that. This article offers them a step-by-step approach. It involves analyzing historical data, conducting experiments, and assessing the results, and when applied systematically can add as much as 20% to the revenues of existing stores. Even better, if staffing increases at some stores are offset by cuts at others, and vendors fund product training, those higher sales will cost retailers little or nothing to generate.

At a time when many traditional retailers are closing their physical stores, digitally native vertical brands such as Bonobos, which specializes in men's apparel, and Warby Parker, which specializes in eyeglasses, are aggressively expanding into offline locations. In this article, the authors explore two related trends: (1) the expansion of online-first retailers into offline stores that "supercharge"customer value and (2) the transformation of stores run by traditional, offline-first retailers from fulfillment-dominant centers into experience-dominant centers. As authors David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino, and Antonio Moreno note, as digitally native vertical brands have learned to build relationships with customers, traditional retailers have been reducing their store sizes and inventories and are attempting to improve and elevate the customer experience. "Showroom experiences," they write, "create better customers." When customers are exposed to the brand in a showroom, "they are better able to resolve any uncertainty about the nondigital attributes of the retailer's product."Similarly, the authors say, "showrooms create better retailers: When customers are physically present in the retail environment, observation of their behaviors can lead to meaningful insights." The authors developed their early insights into what customers value while working closely with Bonobos and Warby Parker. Through simulations, they saw that stores with smaller footprints and a higher level of service led to better results economically -improved margins, smoother logistics, and better control of inventory. They found that, rather than being dead, physical retail stores were very much alive with a profound shift in focus -from fulfillment to experience-oriented environments. The authors conclude that online-first retailers and traditional retailers have something to learn from each other.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Customers are increasingly "omnichannel"-deploying both online and offline channels -in their thinking and behavior. In order to win in this new environment, sellers also must be omnichannel. That means having explicit strategies for the two core channel functions -provision of information about products and product fulfillment -and offering the right combination of experiences for their customers. The authors have developed a customer-focused framework for delivering these strategies, drawing on empirical research conducted with both offline-first retailers like Crate & Barrel and online first retailers like Warby Parker. Traditional, or offline-first, retailers need to leverage the online channel not only for fulfillment but also as a venue for delivering price, inventory and other information desired by customers. Using data from a natural experiment conducted at Crate & Barrel, a retailer of furnishings and housewares, the authors show that by providing accurate price and inventory information online, a traditional retailer can significantly increase sales and traffic to offline stores. Similarly, New York-based Warby Parker, an eyeglasses retailer that started out selling online, sells products with tactile features that some customers want to experience offline. The authors describe how Warby Parker has experienced significant benefits by developing an offline presence. For Warby Parker, offline showrooms that provide product inventory for customers to sample drive increased sales through the online channel. Furthermore, the authors note, when online-first retailers develop offline channels to deliver information, this allows customers to sort more appropriately into the channel that best suits them.