I totally agree retail ecommerce and point of sale systems will become one, they simply must, the higher up in the organization you are the clearer this is to you. After all, those leaders are the people who create the plans that RSR references below.
But plans are one thing, what this study overlooks is at the ground level these separate ecommerce and in-store retail teams who would put this approach in place believe operationally, tangibly, and some times even strategically that they are solving different problems.
Until leadership conveys the unified story, the value to the consumer and the imperative for their business in a way the teams on the ground believe it to their core the inertia of these parallel paths will unfortunately not be broken.
Retailers Expect eCommerce Platforms to Power All Commerce In the Future
Until this year’s eCommerce Benchmark, The Great Leveler: eCommerce’s Next Move, it has seemed as though money was no object to improving eCommerce capabilities — new implementations were human — rather than financial resource-constrained. Given those investments, it’s only logical retailers would look to expand capabilities built into their eCommerce platforms across the enterprise. As we can see in the Figure below, those interests have not translated into budgets yet, but have found their way into corporate priority lists as planned.
Figure: Finding New Uses for eCommerce Capabilities
