Retailers love to talk about omnichannel. It’s become a kind of shorthand for progress. A signal that systems are connected, teams are aligned, and the customer journey is seamless from start to finish.
But spend any real time moving between online and in-store as a customer, and a different picture often emerges.
The website feels slick. The messaging is clear. The offer makes sense.
Then you step into the shop, and something shifts. Not dramatically, not in a way that anyone could easily pinpoint, but enough to feel it.
A hesitation. A mismatch. A moment of uncertainty.
That’s all it takes.
While retailers think in channels, customers never do. They don’t see ecommerce and retail as separate entities. They see one brand, one experience, one relationship. So, when that experience starts to unravel, they notice immediately. Long before the business does.
Where the Experience Starts to Unravel
The cracks rarely appear as major failures. More often, they show up in small, everyday moments that chip away at confidence over time.
It might be a customer standing at the till, phone in hand, showing a “10% off your first order” email. The kind that works beautifully online. The kind designed to convert quickly.
Except it isn’t valid in-store.
The team member serving them hasn’t seen it before. There’s a pause, a quick check, a slightly awkward explanation. What should have been a simple transaction turns into a negotiation.
No one’s done anything wrong. But the experience doesn’t feel joined up, and that’s what the customer takes away.
Or it might be something more operational, but no less damaging.
I still remember the elation of a product going viral online just before Christmas. Orders flooding in over the weekend, the kind of moment every retailer hopes for. It felt like everything we’d been working towards had finally clicked.
Then Saturday arrived.
The shop was busy, as you’d expect in the run-up to Christmas. Customers were picking up the same product in-store, and it was flying out. Faster than we could keep track of.
By Monday morning, the reality hit. We’d sold more than we physically had.
At that stage, we were too small to have systems that automatically stopped online orders when stock dropped below a certain level. So, the only option was to refund some of those online purchases.
There’s nothing quite like that sinking feeling. Not just operationally, but emotionally. You’ve created demand, taken someone’s money, and then had to go back to them and say, “Sorry, we can’t fulfil this.”
For a customer, that quickly breaks trust.
For an owner-operator retailer, it’s heartbreaking.
This Isn’t Just a Tech Problem
When these situations happen, it’s tempting to look straight at the systems.
Better integrations. Smarter platforms. More sophisticated tooling.
And yes, technology plays a role. It always does. But more often than not, the underlying issue isn’t that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that it isn’t aligned, understood, or confidently used across the business. Omnichannel doesn’t fail because of a lack of tools. It fails because the experience those tools are meant to support isn’t joined up.
The Pressure Points Retailers Keep Underestimating
In my experience, particularly working with independent retailers scaling up into multi-channel businesses, there are a few consistent areas where things start to come undone.
Promotions That Don’t Translate
Online promotions are one of the quickest wins in ecommerce. They’re easy to deploy, easy to track, and often effective. But without clear alignment, they can quickly create friction in-store.
Customers expect consistency. They assume that what they see online will be recognised in person. When it isn’t, it puts the store team in a difficult position. They either have to honour something they weren’t briefed on, or push back and risk damaging the relationship. Neither is ideal.
Click-and-Collect Without Confidence
Click-and-collect should be one of retail’s strongest advantages. It combines the convenience of online with the immediacy and human interaction of the shop floor.
Customers clearly value it. Studies consistently show that around 69% of shoppers say click-and-collect influences where they choose to shop.
I was recently at eCommerce Scotland, speaking on a panel with Michelle Gunn from Schuh, and this was a topic that came up more than once. Not because retailers don’t offer click-and-collect, but because the execution varies so widely.
When it works well, it feels effortless. When it doesn’t, it feels awful.
Staff searching for orders. Systems not quite lining up. Customers waiting longer than they expected. The promise is convenience, but the reality can feel improvised.
Those moments matter because they’re often the first or only in-person interaction a customer has with your brand.
Loyalty That Doesn’t Feel Loyal
Customers love a loyalty scheme until it doesn’t work.
A good loyalty programme should feel seamless. Points earned, points redeemed, history visible, benefits clear. Whether the customer shops online or in-store shouldn’t matter.
But when loyalty sits in silos, the experience quickly becomes frustrating. Points earned online that can’t be used in-store. Purchases that don’t appear in a unified account. Staff who can’t access or explain how it works. At that point, what was designed to build loyalty starts to erode it.
Stock Accuracy: The Quiet Saboteur
Stock is one of the least glamorous parts of retail, but one of the most critical. Customers expect accuracy. If something shows as available, they assume it is. If they reserve it, they expect it to be there. When that doesn’t happen, it undermines confidence and trust immediately.
And unlike a pricing error or a delayed delivery, stock issues tend to feel avoidable from the customer’s perspective. Which makes them harder to forgive.
The Human Layer That Holds It All Together
What sits behind all of this isn’t just systems. It’s people. Store teams, in particular, have never been more important.
In a world where so much of the transaction happens online, the shop floor is where the brand becomes real. It’s where questions are answered, problems are solved, and relationships are built—and yet, too often, store teams are the last to be brought into the conversation.
They’re expected to deliver an experience they haven’t been fully briefed on, using tools they haven’t been trained in, for customers who assume they already know everything.
That’s a difficult position to be in. These teams aren’t just executing transactions. They are the brand, in human form.
Omnichannel Success Is an Alignment Challenge
There’s a tendency to treat omnichannel as a systems project. Something that can be solved with the right platform, the right integrations, the right stack.
But the retailers who get this right tend to approach it differently.
They focus on alignment first.
- Clear ownership across channels.
- Strong internal communication.
- Confidence in using customer data.
- Processes that support what the website promises.
Tech then supports that foundation, rather than trying to compensate for its absence.
Final Thought
The gap between bricks and clicks isn’t always obvious from the inside. It’s easy to assume things are working because the systems are in place and the metrics look healthy.
But customers experience your business in a much simpler way.
- They don’t see channels.
- They don’t see systems.
- They don’t see internal structures.
- They see one brand.
When that brand feels consistent, confident, and easy to deal with, they come back.
When it doesn’t, they notice—and they remember.
