News

SmartHub benchmarking study focuses on status of omnichannel

July 26, 2013

The commerce solution provider Innotrac Corp. released its latest SmartHub eCommerce benchmarking analysis, evaluating omnichannel retailing and the data around omnichannel activities of leading retailers.

The current study reports on retailer activities in the categories of mobile shopping, in-store pickup, returning to a retail store, leveraging inventory, ship from store, customer service and packaging.

Key findings include:

• The omnichannel process that has been most widely adopted by retailers, offered by 77 percent of retailers in the study, is the ability to purchase product online and return it to a retail location.
• Only 24 percent of webstores are able to show in-store inventories to consumers, with a little over half of customer service agents able to answer questions about local inventory.
• Of the 225 merchants sampled, 81 percent provided mobile optimized shopping sites, while only 39 percent had a mobile app.

"This study revealed that retailers have a ways to go in some of the most critical areas, like leveraging inventory across channels and shipping orders from stores that mirror the brand experience delivered when shipping from a distribution center," said Melissa O'Keefe, the senior director of marketing at Innotrac. "The next couple of years will definitely be interesting to watch as the omnichannel evolution continues."

Read more about multichannel retailing.