04.24.08
Retail Channel Duct Tape
Multi-channel retail opens the door to duct tape solutions. The brick and mortar store may operate on a different platform than the internet store and mail order may be different again. Being on different platforms can then result in duplicating logic on each platform to support the shopping cart, the customer, and items (products).
Logic may be duplicated for other reasons as well. There may be separately purchased software solutions for each channel or there may be separate organizations responsible for each channel’s software. Either of these circumstances can make collaboration impossible. For what ever reason, the duplicated logic is a duct tape solution.
This duplication can be very costly. One retailer very dependent upon providing creative product promotions to get customers in the door got caught in this duct tape. Implementing new creative promotions required that the software for each channel be modified. Essentially, the cost to add a new promotion was three times as expensive as it should have been. This excessive cost resulted in many great promotional ideas to be dropped from the Marketing plan. These excellent promotional ideas could not be done without proof that the promotion would at least cover the cost of the software changes.
This retail organization, as many others as well, saw the value of converging the functionality of the channels into a single set of reusable functions. One of these functions, promotions, was the first considered. After examining promotions, a design emerged that allowed for sharing the functionality across all channels. A more abstract view of the promotions was taken so adding new innovative promotions became straight forward with little cost.
