Iconography’s integration-free solution, OMNIS, is a unified commerce platform which blends ecommerce, RMS, CRM and EPoS to “free retailers of the constraints of their existing platforms”, writes director Wayne Robbins …
Are you really relying on legacy retail software to help you compete and grow in the 2020’s?
We work with independent furniture retailers and believe only the innovative, efficient and agile will thrive in the 2020s.
The two essential ingredients for success in the future, in our view, are developing the right mindset – essentially an agile, hybrid approach to online and store-based retail – and deploying the right software to help you achieve it.
If you’re fed up with integration faultlines which exist between ecommerce and legacy, store-based retail software, and if you’re impacted by the resulting inefficiency, duplication of effort, mistakes, errors and delays – we have the solution.
To compete online successfully (if that is a strategic aim), you need to think very differently. You need to select the right product mix to market to those ‘online customers’, buy in the right volumes of stock to ensure good margins, availability and lead times, and offer flexible web payment options and competitive delivery.
If you want to be an online player, it’s a totally different ballgame to in-store.
Simply replicating your physical store online, in our experience, is not the winning formula. If that is your approach, you’ll be very busy managing an extensive product catalogue, all those swatches, all those options, all those price changes, but you won’t necessarily be generating significant additional online sales if those products are not a good fit for online retail.
In essence, it’s about picking products to sell online, and products to feature online to drive store footfall and enquiries.
This is the realisation that many furniture retailers are reaching.
The challenge today is that you need to be multifaceted – focused, relevant and clear – both online and in-store. This is much easier said than done.
Operational efficiency is therefore essential – as there are two retail versions of yourself to manage, and only so any hours in the day. Efficiency should be central to everything you do, and it’s why you need to move away from inefficient, store-centric legacy software.
Many retailers now acknowledge old software is slowing them down and holding them back – in terms of effectively creating and managing compelling, store-based and online retail propositions.
We believe success is about new thinking. It is about developing and managing online and in-store versions of yourself with ease – our unified commerce platform, OMNIS Retail, points to the future.
