Chapitre 08 - Omnichannel & Retail Trends
Explorer les stratégies qui unifient magasin physique et expérience digitale : click & collect, phygital, parcours client sans couture.
Two Worlds, One Journey
Un client commande depuis son canapé, récupère son colis en magasin une heure plus tard, puis partage son avis en ligne - sans jamais sentir de rupture. Regarde ce service en action.
A real customer walkthrough of a click-and-collect order, from checkout to in-store pickup.
Your Turn
Describe, in your own words, the customer's journey from the moment they click 'Buy' to the moment they leave the store with their product. Then imagine: what would happen if the item wasn't ready on time? Write 2-3 ideas.
Bridging Store and Screen
Canada Goose - Phygital Retail, a CMO Interview. Objective : understand why a global brand is investing in technology inside its physical stores, not just online.
In your opinion, what does "phygital" mean, based on the word itself? Name two pieces of technology you might expect to find inside a modern physical store:
Note down every term related to blending digital and physical retail that you hear (e.g. seamless, touchpoint, experience…). Aim for at least 6 terms:
According to the CMO, why does a brand still need physical stores in a digital age? In 2-3 sentences, summarise the main reason given.
Read & Analyse
Lis cet article. Repère : chiffres & statistiques termes-clés omnicanal
The Omnichannel Imperative: Why Retailers Can No Longer Separate Online from In-Store
For decades, retailers organised their business around a simple divide: the physical store on one side, the website on the other - often run by separate teams with separate budgets and separate stock. That divide has now effectively collapsed. Today's shopper moves fluidly between a smartphone screen, a store aisle, and a social media feed within a single purchase decision, and expects the brand to keep up at every step.
Showrooming and its mirror image. Retailers have long worried about showrooming - customers examining a product in a physical store, then buying it online at a lower price. But research increasingly points to the opposite behaviour being just as common: webrooming, in which a shopper researches a product online, compares reviews and prices, and then completes the purchase in a physical store. This "research online, purchase offline" pattern, often called the ROPO effect, means a lost online sale is frequently not a lost sale at all - simply one that closes through a different channel.
"The retailers who still ask 'online or in-store?' are asking the wrong question. The only question that matters is whether the customer can move between the two without ever noticing the seam." - a retail transformation consultant, quoted in a 2024 industry report.
The phygital store. To close that seam, retailers are investing heavily in what industry commentators call phygital experiences - physical spaces enhanced by digital tools. Digital signage replaces static posters with real-time promotions; smart fitting rooms use RFID tags to recognise garments and suggest matching items on an interactive mirror; and endless aisle kiosks let a customer order an out-of-stock size or colour for home delivery without ever leaving the shop floor. None of this works, however, without a single technical foundation: real-time inventory visibility across every channel, so that a sales assistant, a website, and a mobile app are always showing the same stock figures.
Building this kind of unified commerce infrastructure is expensive and organisationally difficult - it typically requires merging teams, systems, and even bonus structures that were designed to compete with, rather than support, each other. But for commercial managers, the direction of travel is no longer in doubt: every touchpoint, whether a shop window, a chatbot, or a delivery text message, is now judged as part of one single, continuous customer journey.
Words: ~390 · Level: B2 · Source: Adapted from a 2024 retail strategy industry report
After reading
Identify three omnichannel practices the article describes. For each one, note a specific figure or example from the text:
The Omnichannel Retail Lexicon
12 termes fondamentaux de la stratégie omnicanale. Tu les retrouveras dans S'exercer et Appliquer.