[Source: The Retail Site - Retail Business News, Ideas, and Tips Blog]
The payoff in web-enabled point-of-sale: Better service for valuable customers
By Don Davis
Many cross-channel initiatives have added features to retailers’ web sites, such as ordering online for in-store pickup or visibility into a store’s inventory. But some retailers are starting from the other end—the store—and adding Internet connectivity to their point-of-sale systems, giving employees access to the retailer’s own web site and other web-based data.
Whether the retailer is a national chain like J.C. Penney Co. Inc., which has web-enabled all 35,000 of its POS terminals in nearly 1,100 stores, or a single-store merchant like Loser Kids Inc. outside of San Diego, the goal is the same: make the retailer appear to the customer as one big store, even if it sells via the web and catalogs as well as through bricks-and-mortar stores.
$466 versus $313
That’s important because customers increasingly shop the retailers they like online and off and expect each retailer to recognize them across channels, and because multi-channel shoppers tend to be profitable customers. The typical multi-channel customer spends $466 per year versus $313 for someone who shops only one channel, according to a Forrester Research Inc. survey of retailers last year for e-retailer trade association Shop.org.
Read the entire article at Internet Retailer
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