Mens Et Opera - Reloaded

For readers who might be interested, I thought it would be useful to gather together in one place links to various posts on Omnichannel and customer-centricity. On to the posts. It's the customer, stupid! The "relational gap" in the Australian Retail sector  The misleading Omnichannel...thing Business as a Calling: How Catchoftheday and Tinyme fulfill their call Omnichannel doesn't necessarily mean customer happiness Does Product-Centricity conflic with Customer-Centricity? Drop Shipping: the competitive advantage of pure players over bricks and mortar What's customer experience, anyway? "The Company is like a verb whose subject is the customer" Enjoy!

I recently had a chance to briefly speak with Adam Jacobs, MD and founder of The Iconic .  He’s a young and bullish entrepreneur who is doing a great job at cracking the serfdom of Australian shoppers created by the likes of David Jones and Myer. I asked him how he manages his “free three-hour same day delivery” service for those products that are on demand, i.e. not physically stored in the warehouse but still available on the website. I admit the question was thought-provoking because it brings up one of the challenges retailers face when they have a drop shipping program in place. But what's drop-shipping anyway? Imagine the possibilities for retailers to display a product on their digital channels without having it in their inventory. Exciting? Welcome to drop shipping! What has it got to do with The Long Tail? For those who have missed out the debate on ‘the long tail’, this is my capsule summary: retailers can grow sales in two ways, a) selling fewer popul...