Digitalization and Omnichannel Retailing

The technology trend is rapidly reshaping the retail industry. With digitalization, some traditional business rules have been altered, removing many physical barriers while at the same time adding more challenges. This chapter first discusses the fundamental changes brought by the digital trend. To begin, it investigates traditional business wisdom and the underlying mechanisms of traditional business operations. The chapter examines the barriers to retailers in the traditional business world. Then, it focuses on how the digitalization trend can transform the realization of those mechanisms in order to remove the barriers and how retailers can best adjust to the changes. The implications of digitalization apply to both current and future marketing operations. When facing the new opportunities and challenges created by the digitalization trend, retailers cannot rely only on the traditional offline channel; they also need to seek omnichannel retailing. However, merging into omnichannel retailing from a traditional offline mode is not easy. The second part of the chapter thus discusses several specific risks that omnichannel retailers must tackle.