Omnichannel: Why the Customer Belongs to the Brand, Not the Sales Channel

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało talks with a guest expert in retail digitization about the evolution of e-commerce and omnichannel strategy in Poland. They discuss how omnichannel differs from traditional multichannel selling, and how the role of logistics and last-mile delivery is changing.

FROM SINGLE CHANNEL TO OMNICHANNEL: FOUR STAGES OF EVOLUTION

Polish e-commerce moved from single touchpoints with the customer (one website, in the 2000s) through multichannel (several independent channels, where the customer had to finish a transaction wherever they started it) and cross-channel (channels starting to blend under customer pressure) to omnichannel — coordinated service where the customer belongs to the brand, not to a specific sales channel. The key difference: in multichannel, returning a product bought online at a physical store ended in a refusal; in omnichannel, that's not the customer's problem, it's a job for the company's systems.

OMNICHANNEL CUSTOMERS BUY 2.5 TIMES MORE OFTEN

Data from the cosmetics and sporting-goods industries shows a clear pattern: customers who move between online and offline channels shop on average 2.5 times more often than customers loyal to a single channel — even if any one basket is smaller, their cumulative annual transaction value makes them the most valuable group for a brand.

THE TEMPTATION OF SHARED STOCK, AND ITS HIDDEN COSTS

Since goods are already sitting close to the customer in a physical store, the temptation arises to ship directly from there instead of the central warehouse — an intellectually simple idea that triggers an avalanche of processes: managing stock availability between retail and e-commerce channels, conflicts with the sales team defending store stock, deciding reservation priority (Allegro or an individual customer), and how often to refresh inventory levels. The historical example of Neonet a decade ago — picking up goods from a store via a local carrier and delivering within 4 hours — or the Intercars model built around a branch network and deliveries to workshops up to four times a day, show that a solution exists, but it requires redesigning all of logistics, not just bolting on a channel.

PRICE AND OFFER: AN INVISIBLE LAYER OF COMPLEXITY

Price consistency across channels sounds simple until a marketplace enters the picture: Allegro charges a commission in the range of ten-odd to several dozen percent, and simultaneously penalizes a seller if it detects a lower price for the same product on another channel — so "consistent price" and "profitable price" start competing with each other. On top of that come promotions targeted at just one channel (e.g. mobile-app discounts building a user base with no acquisition cost), different sourcing (own warehouse, dropshipping, order-for-order wholesale), and different refresh rates for prices and stock levels — a real area where even a well-designed process can end up selling "underwater" or showing a stale offer.

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IS PEOPLE, NOT TECHNOLOGY

Deploying omnichannel isn't an IT project — it's a change that touches every process in the company. The biggest mistake is handing a technology vendor a ready-made brief ("we want the system we have now, just digital") instead of first mapping processes across departments and understanding where the new channel actually touches them. The second key factor is internal communication: employees hear an announcement of "digital transformation" as an announcement of layoffs, when in practice the change usually multiplies the number of roles (SEO specialists, pricing, personalization) at the expense of purely repetitive ones. The project needs clear, active support from the board — it's never one person's decision, or a separate sales channel, it's a project for the whole organization.