Establishing an impactful omnichannel retail strategy

With an unprecedented number of interconnected systems, platforms, and channels, the face of retail is permanently changed.

A report by ShipStation reveals that 75% of shoppers use both digital and physical touchpoints on the same customer journey, which is defined as where and how customers research, purchase, receive, and even return products.

Focusing on a cohesive online and offline experience—a hallmark of omnichannel commerce—is still a winning retail strategy for brands in 2025.

Omnichannel retail isn’t just a fancy term for multichannel; it’s all about flexibility and synergy, with the goal of unlocking greater opportunity while streamlining your operations and squeezing more value out of your data.

In this blog we cover what omnichannel retail is, why businesses implement an omnichannel strategy, and what you should consider when building out the right strategy for your business.

What is omnichannel retail?

Omnichannel retail is a business model that integrates various customer touchpoints, like physical stores, websites, mobile apps, sales channels, and even chatbots, into a unified shopping experience. Basically, it allows you to reach more customers in more places and ensure they have a consistent experience with your brand.

The strategy relies on utilizing data and technology to streamline operations, personalize interactions, and offer conveniences such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) or cross-channel returns, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and nurturing more loyal customers.

Omnichannel retail vs multichannel retail

An omnichannel retail strategy, like a multichannel strategy, involves selling products on multiple channels, but its key distinction lies in integrating systems to deliver a seamless brand and shopping experience across all touchpoints. By contrast, in a multichannel model, strategies on different channels are employed independently of each other and are said to be “siloed.”

Omnichannel emphasizes synchronized data between channels to streamline operations and provide a personalized experience before, during, and after a purchase.

When businesses focus solely on either front-end or back-end, they are essentially operating in a multichannel approach. Omnichannel combines these elements into a cohesive customer-centric strategy.

Reasons to have an omnichannel retail strategy

As the retail industry has evolved, consumers now expect the flexibility to engage with brands across various channels, whether that’s completing a quick checkout online or utilizing convenient options like curbside pickup. With shoppers moving beyond single-channel interactions, brands can lean on an omnichannel strategy to keep their multiplatform systems in sync.

When implemented correctly, an omnichannel retail strategy helps businesses expand their reach, enhance relationships, streamline operations, and stay competitive in the following ways:

Reaching and engaging new customers

Omnichannel retail helps businesses expand their reach by allowing customers to interact through their preferred channels in a way that doesn’t feel incongruent with the overall brand experience.

Whether it’s listing products on popular marketplaces, using targeted social media ads, or driving traffic to physical stores via local inventory ads, brands can tap into diverse customer segments that would otherwise not have considered shopping with them.

By leveraging data and the right technology, businesses can also tailor their approach to specific demographics, creating unique marketing campaigns and offers to attract new audiences.

Enhancing customer relationships

An omnichannel retail strategy deepens the relationship between customers and brands by providing convenience, personalization, and consistency whether customers shop in-store, online, or through a mobile app.

By making it easier for customers to discover, purchase, and receive support, brands build trust and loyalty. The point is for customers to experience fewer barriers during their shopping journey.

Some examples of this include integrating rewards programs, offering seamless online-to-store returns, and ensuring consistent messaging across platforms to encourage repeat business.

Omnichannel retail strategies also prioritize convenience with features like “endless aisle” shopping, remembering customer details across platforms, or providing flexible fulfillment options like BOPIS.

Streamlining operations

Integrating and synchronizing systems is a cornerstone of an effective omnichannel strategy.

By unifying channel management, order management, and marketing systems, businesses reduce inefficiencies and eliminate data silos. For example, using brick-and-mortar stores as micro-distribution centers for local deliveries can cut costs and speed up shipping.

Streamlined and synchronized fulfillment operations also allow for better inventory management, preventing lost sales due to out-of-stock products.

With the right tech in place, brands can focus on innovation rather than daily operational challenges across the following business processes:

• Inventory management, fulfillment, and logistics
• Marketing and customer engagement
• Multichannel product feed management
• Point-of-sale (POS) and in-store systems

Staying competitive and adaptable

An omnichannel retail strategy enables businesses to stay agile by providing the tools needed to adapt to market dynamics and evolving customer behaviors. This adaptability is critical for addressing challenges such as supply chain disruptions, new shopping habits, and increasing competition.

Here’s how retailers use an omnichannel retail strategy to stay competitive and adaptable across a variety of common ecommerce processes:

• Fulfillment: Using in-store inventory for local deliveries reduces shipping times and costs, giving customers faster service.
• Inventory: Synchronization across channels ensures accurate stock visibility, avoiding overselling and customer frustration.
• Pricing: Dynamic pricing adjusts quickly to market trends, allowing brands to stay competitive.
• Personalization: Consistent customer profiles across platforms enable tailored recommendations and offers, driving repeat purchases.
• Integration: Connecting online and in-store systems enables services like buy online, return in-store (BORIS), increasing convenience.
• Marketing: Coordinating campaigns across digital and physical channels ensures consistent messaging and higher engagement.
• Analytics: Insights from multiple sources improve demand forecasting, inventory planning, and customer experience strategies.

Key considerations for adopting an omnichannel retail strategy

So what exactly goes into a cohesive omnichannel retail strategy? You should be thinking about the aspects of your business that can work synergistically across your channels and systems. This means understanding and managing the data and processes around your customers, marketing, product feeds, fulfillment, and more:

Knowing your audience demographics

Knowing your audience begins with collecting basic demographic information such as age, income, occupation, and location. These insights allow you to identify where your customers spend their time and how they prefer to interact with brands, enabling targeted outreach and resource allocation. Here’s a good starting point:

• Determine where customers are active online (search engines, marketplaces, social media).
• Understand offline touchpoints like events, mailers, and stores.
• Periodically survey customers for updated insights.

You also want to collect first-party data which is essential for creating personalized customer experiences and effective marketing strategies. Collecting this data requires a clear value exchange—offering benefits like discount codes or exclusive perks to motivate customers to share their information.

Understanding customer intent

Understanding customer intent and quantifying it into hard data is key to any omnichannel strategy. Your cross-channel experience, messaging, and marketing should align with where your customers are along the buyer’s journey.

Here are some popular ways to uncover your customer’s intent:

• Search queries and keywords give insights into what customers are actively seeking.
• Engagement metrics like click-through rates, page views, and time spent on pages show you what your customers are actually doing and engaging with.
• Purchase patterns like recurring orders, product categories, and cart abandonment rates give you a look into which products are working for your brand and where customers are stalling along the buying journey.
• Feedback and sentiment from reviews, survey responses, and social media comments can give you a more holistic look into what your customers really think.

By identifying why and how customers engage with your brand, you can then offer tailored experiences that improve satisfaction and drive sales:

• Cross-sell or upsell based on purchase history.
• Assess the value of specific content in guiding customer decisions.
• Offer added convenience, like buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS).

Choosing the right channels

To succeed in omnichannel, focus on the platforms where your customers are most active. Avoid the temptation to be everywhere at once; instead, prioritize intentional channel selection based on research and existing data:

• Identify channels aligned with customer activity (e.g., Google, Instagram, Amazon).
• Evaluate the success of past campaigns to guide future channel investments.
• Research competitors to understand where they are thriving.

Evaluate your offerings to determine where your brand can thrive. Consider key questions:

• What are your brand’s strengths?
• Where are your weaknesses, and how can they be addressed?
• Where do your customers prefer to shop?

For example, a commodity product may benefit from competitive pricing on a marketplace like Amazon, while niche items may flourish on platforms like Etsy.

You also need to determine how important balancing brand control and customer reach is to you. Selling on third-party marketplaces offers unparalleled access to new customers but can compromise control over branding and margins. While marketplaces may not allow full brand autonomy, they can drive awareness and purchases from audiences who might not otherwise discover your brand.

Optimizing product data

If you’re going to run an omnichannel strategy, you need a way of managing your product data and optimizing it. Accurate and detailed product data that meets the unique requirements of each platform makes your listings discoverable and competitive.

Whether you’re selling through marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, or running product listing ads on search, the quality of your product data directly impacts performance.

Each channel has specific data requirements and varying catalog templates, so it’s vital to tailor your product data for each platform. Failure to do so can result in poor discoverability, wasted ad spend, or customer frustration due to out-of-stock or incorrect products being listed. Regularly syncing inventory and keeping product information current is just as important as initial feed setup, ensuring your products are always ready for customers.

To make your product listings as effective as possible across all channels, focus on the following:

• Titles should be clear, concise, and match user search intent. Include relevant keywords and product specifics to ensure your product appears in searches.
• Provide detailed and accurate descriptions that highlight key features, benefits, and specifications. Use rich, keyword-optimized language to improve searchability.
• Assign products to the correct categories based on the channel’s taxonomy, ensuring they are found by the right audience.
• Use high-quality, clear images that show the product from multiple angles, and ensure they meet each channel’s image size and quality standards.
• Include detailed product attributes like size, color, weight, material, and dimensions to help customers make informed purchasing decisions.
• Sync inventory and pricing across platforms to prevent overselling out-of-stock items, which can result in negative customer experiences and canceled orders.

If that sounds like a lot to do manually, that’s because it is. That’s where feed management platforms like Feedonomics come in. You can synchronize, automate, and optimize your product catalog for 300+ channels by using our full-service platform.

Schedule a free demo

Remarketing and retaining customers

Remarketing strategies help you re-engage customers who have shown interest in your brand. From abandoned cart recovery to targeting previous buyers, these campaigns are highly effective at improving conversions and ROI and work well in an omnichannel strategy:

• Use remarketing campaigns to recover abandoned carts.
• Target previous buyers with upselling or cross-selling opportunities.
• Create highly segmented audiences for personalized ads.

Building customer loyalty goes beyond the initial sale, so you also want to consider implementing the following:

• Offer loyalty programs with discounts or rewards for repeat customers.
• Provide clear communication during shipping and returns processes.
• Ensure a consistent experience across all post-purchase touchpoints.

Loyalty programs, exclusive perks, and a seamless post-purchase experience can turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.

Scaling your business

Scaling your business requires a solid logistics and fulfillment strategy, the right technology, and solid talent.

Build an integrated tech stack that includes ecommerce platforms, data feed tools, and order management systems to streamline operations and ensure consistent performance:

• Use data feed platforms to automate, optimize, and synchronize product listings for each channel.
• Implement order management systems to unify multichannel inventory and fulfillment information.
• Leverage advertising automation tools to monitor and adjust ad spend.

The human element—employees trained to operate tools, interpret data, and make informed decisions—plays a pivotal role in maximizing the potential of your investments.

While new technology can revolutionize operations, its value is diminished without proper adoption. It’s a good idea to think about hiring the right talent or training employees so they can leverage new systems effectively. You can buy the shiniest piece of technology on the block, but if you don’t have a path to ensure it’s properly adopted by employees, that devalues your investment.

Beyond training, businesses should recognize areas where internal expertise may fall short. Outsourcing certain functions—like ad management, customer service tools, or data feed management—to specialized teams can be a strategic move. By collaborating with experts, brands can overcome challenges more efficiently and scale sustainably without diverting focus from their core competencies.