Ordering by phone is a habit. Amazon killed it for books and CDs. Should clothing and general merchandise be any different?

Banks have disappeared overnight, investors have lost millions and small countries are bankrupt. Christmas trading figures will not be a pretty sight for most retailers.

But as the new year approaches, this is also the time for budgets and the usual tug-of-war for scarce capital. The debate about how much to invest in the internet, the only source of any growth for many retailers, will be high on the agenda.

For years now, true believers in multichannel have resisted the temptation to force customers down the path of self-service. For bricks-and-clicks retailers to retain a competitive advantage against the pure-plays they must provide the human touch – that’s the theory, anyway.
For customer service this makes sense – service is difficult to deliver without compromise on the internet. Mostly because providing good service is an iterative process and the web prefers logical sequence to iterations.

But web ordering is mostly a sequential process. So why do so many retailers still take so much of their revenue, sometimes as much as 30 per cent, through call centres?

Well if you don’t have stores you might argue that with internet penetration at a plateau, roughly a third of the population would not be able to shop with you if they couldn’t order by phone.

But for many of the UK’s high street names, with a substantial investment in a store chain, this does not apply. As the worst Christmas in 30 years allegedly looms and with the uncertainty about the economy now reduced to whether it will be a recession or a depression, this peak will be a time for sweating every channel available to drive sales.

But as the new year looms, taking cost out of the business will become paramount and surely removing the order line must be high on the list of options?

Ordering by phone is a habit. The grocers broke it earlier this decade and Amazon killed it for books and CDs. Should clothing and general merchandise be any different?

As we head towards the end of a very strange decade, maybe it’s time to break old habits. But it will require courage – it is much easier to apply a headcount freeze and ask managers to get by somehow than take dramatic action. But the events of this year are not an April shower – it is akin to a flood of biblical proportions. Although the rain has stopped we have no idea when it will start again and where.

And when the waters recede and everything dries out we will be faced with the damage. As the industry searches for solutions, maybe this is the time to be just a little bit less multichannel than we were before.

Indira Thambiah , Independent retail adviser