Omnichannel retail strategy

Omnichannel retail strategy, originally also known in the U.K. as bricks and clicks, is a business model by which a company integrates both offline (bricks) and online (clicks) presences, sometimes with the third extra flips (physical catalogs). By the mid-2010s, many (physical store) retailers offered ordering via their website, mobile phone apps, as well as by voice over the telephone. The wide uptake of smartphones made the model even more popular, as customers could browse and order from their smartphone whenever they had spare time. The model has historically also been known by such terms as clicks and bricks, click and mortar, bricks, clicks and flips, and WAMBAM, i.e. "web application meets bricks and mortar".) The default model in e-commerce is one of browsing and ordering online, with goods sent from a warehouse, or in some cases, a retail store. One of the first known purchases from a company arguably operating a bricks and clicks business model was a Pizza Hut pizza ordered over the internet in 1994. The great surge in adoption of the bricks and clicks model came around 2000, with large retailers, such as Walmart, starting websites that allow users to browse some of the same goods that they would find in store from their personal computer screens. Another implementation of the omnichannel model is when a stores offers consumers a choice of purchasing products either online to be picked-up later inside or outside one of their retail stores (click and collect, curbside pickup). The model has many alternative combinations, as well as the related omnichannel concept of showrooming where customers try on clothing in person but the actual purchased product is ordered in-store on the retailer's website and delivered to their home later. By the mid-2010s, the success of the model had discredited earlier theories that the Internet would render traditional retailers obsolete through disintermediation. In the UK, the method is known as "Click and Collect".