Sole traders

A tale of two shoe shops

Other shoe brands are also available

Moving Tribes is going on a trip in a couple of weeks, and so I need some comfortable lightweight casual shoes to replace the ill-fitting and threadbare ones I currently wear. Being a tall lad, I need an odd size of shoe and so this process is never quite as straightforward as you’d think.

Last week’s shoe shopping escapade, though, generated at least as much food for thought as it did footwear. Our lesson for today is one about the IT heavy-lifting that goes into delivering a really great omnichannel customer experience.

Now the basic hard work of delivering a good integrated customer experience is not sexy. My LinkedIn feed is full of retail influencers pooh-poohing boring stuff like linking your channels together - to them, it’s old hat, they’ve been talking about it for years. Let’s move to to the really interesting stuff about augmented reality changing rooms and ChatGPT designed product ranges.

But out in the wild, it is still perfectly possible to come across customer experiences that are horrendously unconnected. And there is a good reason for that - the technology plumbing work needed to glue the store and web experiences together in a way that makes sense for customers is just hard.

Consider this tale of two shoe shops.

Shop 1 - how it should be done

The first place I tried to buy my enormous boat-like shoes was Schuh.

And the experience was, well, just as I’d hoped it would be. On their website you can filter by brand, size and colour as you’d expect. But you can also filter by “in stock in my local store” so if, like me, you are going to want to try your choices on you can. One step further, you can reserve stock in the store for when you get there and, if you instead want to complete your purchase online you have the usual range of options to pay for home delivery or collect in store for free.

What really struck me, though, was that arriving in the store the same options are highly visible there. A screen on the wall allows you to search the stock in that store for the colours and sizes you are interested in, making the experience much more straightforward and, as a spin-off benefit, allowing the store team to operate more efficiently too.

Altogether, an excellent experience that married the benefits of a well designed website to the physical experience in the store and let me seamlessly find what I was looking for.

Shop 2 - a journey back in time

I always feel bad naming and shaming counter-examples because I know how hard running a retail business can be, so let’s just be content with the knowledge that the second shop I tried is a huge chain and, apparently, a senior member of the Trainer royal family.

This is a business where the website is very clearly an entirely separate entity from the store estate. The site is clean enough and allows all of that filtering and searching but there is no way to check stock in a store. As close as the business comes to anything resembling ‘click and collect’ is that you can pay to have your order delivered to a store instead of to your house, and it will be there in a few days time. That’s a tell-tale sign that the web operation as no idea what products are currently in a store, otherwise they’d just fulfil out of store stock if they could.

But the icing on this mono-channel experience came when I arrived in store. “Do you have this in my size?” prompted a store team member to use a handheld scanner to zap the label. “No, sorry”. “Ok, how about this one?”. After a few goes, I defaulted to the obvious - “can’t you just tell me what you do have in my size?” “Nah mate, I’d have to just scan them all”, he said, gesturing at the enormous wall of shoes.

And that was the end of that sales experience.

The glue is the hard part

If you’ve been on this journey in your own business, you’ll recognise that in my two stores I found a straightforward but well executed example of integrated omnichannel retailing on the one hand, and a textbook example of where we all were a decade ago on the other.

Most retailers started selling online by fudging their systems to create “store number 201” and then running the website as if it was just another store, often with its own pot of stock hidden in a corner of the main warehouse. The benefit of that was that you got into the online game fast. The limitations of that as a model, however, quickly became apparent when customers revealed that they saw the website and their local store as aspects of the same business and expected them to have some meaningful connection to each other.

The key ingredient of that turned out to be each channel having visibility of the stock in other, and being able to access it easily. That’s the kind of sentence that is easy to write but brings a CTO out in hives.

The astute observer will note that everything I described in the excellent experience I had with Schuh, and everything that was missing in the other retailer come from that ‘single view of stock’. There are plenty of other things that can knit the customer experience together, but just knowing what stock you have in which store and being able to share than information on your website gets you a huge amount of the way there.

It’s easy for retail boards to get bamboozled by new technology buzzwords but to miss that some of these core capabilities can be utterly transformative to their customer experience. Often times it is the quiet, methodical gluing together of legacy systems and databases that really delivers the value.

Catching up with the customer

That’s a challenge that all retailers face, not just those selling shoes. When you look closely at how customers shop, they will very often check your website before coming into store, and may well want to take some information they’ve gleaned in store home with them, completing their journey online.

I often point out to retail leadership teams that their customers have been omnichannel for years - it is the retailers themselves who are racing to catch up.

Next time you are at one of those conferences listening to a talk about AI-generated virtual reality changing room avatars, consider the fact that your customers might be happier just knowing what you have in stock in their town.

Please do comment, share or re-stack this post - the more we all share perspectives on the business of retailing the better off we all are and I’m hugely grateful for every contribution.