Omnichannel Strategy: Bridging the Gap Between Your Physical Store and Your Online Channel

For the customer, the line between the physical store and the online shop is getting thinner. Inside the business, however, the two channels often still run apart from each other.

An omnichannel strategy is what closes that gap.

Below you will find where integration tends to break down in practice, how the role of store staff is changing and what that means for hiring.

What Omnichannel Really Means in Practice 

Plenty of retailers assume they are already omnichannel because they run a store, a webshop and an active social presence. In reality, that is multichannel. Several channels operating side by side, each with its own logic and its own numbers.

Real omnichannel begins where those channels share the same data and the same view of the customer. The gap shows up on the customer’s side.

In a multichannel setup, a shopper who starts online and finishes in store has to explain themselves twice. In an omnichannel one, the store already knows what they did online. No channels, just one continuous experience.

Close to three in four shoppers check prices or stock online before setting foot in a store, according to research by Locala and EMARKETER (2025). 

The Three Points Where Integration Breaks

Integration rarely fails at strategy level. It fails at three operational points, where the data behind the two channels stops matching up.

• Stock: A click and collect order goes through for an item that was sold off the shelf an hour earlier. The customer finds out before the system does.
• Customer data: The person at the till cannot see the order history or the conversation the customer already had with online support. Each channel keeps its own records.
• Pricing and promotions: Campaigns are built by different teams, on different timelines, against different sales targets.

The problem is not the systems – it is that nobody spots the mismatch in time. Fewer than three in ten retailers have full visibility into what is happening in their stores, from empty shelves to the prices actually being charged, according to research by Coresight Research and Simbe (2024). In the end, the cost lands on the shop floor, where an employee has to explain a decision nobody in the store made.

The Store Role Is Changing

Sales assistants used to walk customers through product features but that job has largely gone. The person standing across the counter has read the specs, compared prices and often knows the product better than the assistant does. The value of the conversation is no longer information, it is guidance: help choosing between the two or three options they have already shortlisted.

At the same time, stores are absorbing work that used to sit in the warehouse. Picking click and collect orders, processing returns from online purchases and shipping stock straight off the shelf all land inside the same shift.

The result is a role pulling in two directions. Sales adviser on one side, fulfilment point on the other. Unless those are defined as two separate jobs, the orders will always win. They come with a deadline – serving a customer on the floor does not.

Skills and Hiring Criteria

The job has moved from selling to advising and fulfilling orders, and the candidate profile has moved with it. Sales experience still counts, but on its own it no longer covers what a store floor demands.

What employers now look for

Working across integrated channels calls for a mix of abilities that used to belong to separate jobs:

• Comfort with systems: Order and inventory software, used daily, not just the till.
• Switching between tasks: Moving from a customer to an order queue and back without letting either slip.
• Handling the informed customer: Managing conversations where the shopper arrives with their own data, sometimes contradicting what the system shows.

When pay and bonus structures work against the strategy

The biggest barrier to integration is rarely technical. It is how performance gets measured. If store bonuses are calculated purely on in-store turnover, a sale that starts at the shelf and completes online counts for nothing.

Store teams pick up on this quickly. When an item is out of stock on the shelf, an assistant can place the order through the webshop on the customer’s behalf. If that sale never shows up in the store’s numbers, there is no incentive to do it, no matter what the strategy says.

Integrating channels means revisiting how store performance is measured. In practice, that can mean:

• Crediting online sales to the store that started them or serves that catchment.
• Counting click and collect orders as store activity, not just ecommerce volume.
• Ring-fencing time or staff for fulfilment so it stops competing with selling hours.
• Deciding how credit is split before launch, not case by case afterwards.

Conclusion

What separates good integration from bad comes down to one thing: whether stock, customer data and pricing tell the same story at every point of contact.

Channels will keep mattering less to shoppers. Retailers will have to move with that, and not only on the systems side. Job descriptions, training and the way store performance is judged all need to catch up.

INGROUP supports retail businesses with staffing and workforce management built for an integrated service model. Get in touch to talk through what your team needs.