Supply Chain As One Of The Key For Brick&Mortar Online Strategy

As I have said, 2015 will be the year of a great online confrontation between pure players like Amazon and brick&mortar competitors, like Carrefour or Walmart. If Amazon master the online playground, and large marketshares which will be difficult to earn, brick&mortar owns a large store network to organize click&collect. 

Nevertheless, one of the key factor of success of Amazon is its inventory management. It masters the information of product availability in order to provide higher customer service. I read an interesting article about supply chain on this topic. 

What the article highlight is that the fact for a retailer to have a complete visibility of its inventory both online and offline, at all time, is a key to its online success. It is easier said than done though: The compatibility and the merger between both the online supply chain and the off line one is far from being achived.

39% of retailers say they have a synchronization of both channels. 44% of the retailers which responded to the study say they can't synchronize both, and 42% of them don't have a complete vision of its customers between both channels.

One of the key to brick&mortar strategy to go online is this information system synchronization and more flexibility in its supply chain.