Comment: The six buzzwords of ecommerce and multichannel retailing

Internationalisation, localisation, multichannel integration, mobilisation, personalisation and prioritisation. The latter gets the least focus.

I believe retail is the vanguard of innovation (there’s another ‘ation’).

However, I often think that we in retail are like magpies, flying off after the next shiny new thing when we haven’t even got the basics right.

Internationalisation is all the rage, and has a lot of scope. However, I recently met a sizeable retailer that was going full steam into it, when click-and-collect isn’t on its roadmap and it has no customer relationship management in place. Surprising, given it has limited international exposure and considering that customers require the convenience of click-and-collect.

Internationalisation can be an effective acquisition strategy. But it shouldn’t come at the cost of customer retention.

Paul Smith has implemented some localisation and has a Japanese site. I get that, as he’s big in Japan. However, the business doesn’t have a mobile site for its home market.

Given most of its customers now prefer to browse and buy through mobile, it will undoubtedly lose significant sales demand.

The building blocks for growth are many, and that’s part of the issue in terms of what and how to prioritise.

A few of these include range extension, supply chain, increasing resources, mobile, click-and-collect, assisted
sales in-store, conversion rate optimisation, loyalty and personalisation.

Of course, the enabler for much of this is technology.

That is a long list. So how do you prioritise?

To begin with, you need to know how your customers want to shop and engage with you. Then you need to determine which of the above will help deliver that experience and what other elements will bring you the most growth and the best ROI. And you need to qualify this with a business case and some benchmarks.

That’s what I call commercialisation.

• Martin Newman, Chief executive, Practicology