Play each retail channel up to its strengths, Sears’ Bill Bass advises

A key strategy of every multi-channel retailer should be to focus on each selling channel’s strengths, while finding the right balance of channel independence and multi-channel integration, Bill Bass, vice president of Sears, Roebuck and Co.’s Sears Customer Direct, told the opening general session at the eTail 2005 conference in Palm Desert, CA, this week.

“You don’t want channels to be totally independent, but you don’t want them to be totally integrated,” said Bass, who is also senior vice president of Lands’ End, a unit of Sears. “Be reasonably consistent across channels, but not too consistent.”

Bass said that integration among channels supports important services like in-store pick-up of online orders, a feature that accounts for more than 40% of Sears’ online sales

But in other ways channel integration can go too far, such as in online versions of printed catalogs. “This is a bad idea,” he said, “People don’t click on online catalogs.” Bass also said he hasn’t seen any good use for in-store kiosks intended for customer self-service, because consumers haven’t shown much interest in them.

There are exceptions to the rule, he added. One of the more interesting uses of online technology in a multi-channel environment, he said, is to provide online pages of merchandise in more color combinations than may be available in a store; if a store is out of all but one or two colors of KitchenAid countertop mixing machines, for example, a sales clerk could use Sears.com to show the several color varieties available, then offer to have the customer’s choice shipped at no charge.

Bass said it’s also important for multi-channel retailers to elicit maximum cooperation from employees in each channel. “Pay and bonuses are critical,” he said. “If store employees see the Internet as a way to steal business from stores, they’ll do what they can to thwart the online business.

One of the best ways to get cooperation across channels is to provide equal credit to both the web and online operations for purchases that begin in one channel but finish in the other. Although only one channel can be allocated the sales figures in accounting records, sales handled through more than one channel could be credited toward employees in both channels to satisfy a retailer’s requirements for earning a year-end bonus, Bass said.