Welcome to the latest in our series of Internet Retailing supplements, where this month we’re looking at cross-channel retailing. Since we first covered multichannel retailing in-depth in an Internet Retailing supplement two years ago, the landscape has changed enormously. Customers have become more sophisticated as technology has evolved, and today shoppers simply expect to be able to shop whenever and wherever is most convenient. No longer are they browsing and buying in one channel rather than another – what we call multichannel. Today they want to research, browse and buy in the channel that’s at their fingertips at that moment in time, whether that’s a PC, a shop or a smartphone, a tablet computer. It might be through the retailer’s own website or through a third- party website such as Facebook. Helping customers making those journeys to enjoy a seamless service throughout is what cross-channel commerce is all about.
