By Steph Briggs

Retailers love to talk about omnichannel. It’s become a kind of shorthand for progress. A signal that systems are connected, teams are aligned, and the customer journey is seamless from start to finish.

But spend any real time moving between online and in-store as a customer, and a different picture often emerges.

The website feels slick. The messaging is clear. The offer makes sense.

Then you step into the shop, and something shifts. Not dramatically, not in a way that anyone could easily pinpoint, but enough to feel it.

A hesitation. A mismatch. A moment of uncertainty.

That’s all it takes.

While retailers think in channels, customers never do. They don’t see ecommerce and retail as separate entities. They see one brand, one experience, one relationship. So, when that experience starts to unravel, they notice immediately. Long before the business does.

The cracks rarely appear as major failures. More often, they show up in small, everyday moments that chip away at confidence over time.

It might be a customer standing at the till, phone in hand, showing a “10% off your first order” email. The kind that works beautifully online. The kind designed to convert quickly.

Except it isn’t valid in-store.

The team member serving them hasn’t seen it before. There’s a pause, a quick check, a slightly awkward explanation. What should have been a simple transaction turns into a negotiation.

No one’s done anything wrong. But the experience doesn’t feel joined up, and that’s what the customer takes away.

Or it might be something more operational, but no less damaging.

I still remember the elation of a product going viral online just before Christmas. Orders flooding in over the weekend, the kind of moment every retailer hopes for. It felt like everything we’d been working towards had finally clicked.

Then Saturday arrived.

The shop was busy, as you’d expect in the run-up to Christmas. Customers were picking up the same product in-store, and it was flying out. Faster than we could keep track of.

By Monday morning, the reality hit. We’d sold more than we physically had.

At that stage, we were too small to have systems that automatically stopped online orders when stock dropped below a certain level. So, the only option was to refund some of those online purchases.

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