Store-First Thinking Is Holding Retail Back

The hardest truth in retail right now: shoppers don’t live in your org chart. They search on phones, compare in aisles, split baskets across channels, and expect you to keep up without friction. We unpack why a store‑first mindset misses where demand is born and how a digital‑infused model unlocks growth you can actually sustain.

I walk through the numbers that matter—digital influence on total sales, the share of omnichannel growth driven by e‑commerce, and why leaders like Walmart are seeing outsized gains online. From there, we map the real blockers: siloed merchandising and marketing, conflicting promo calendars, inventory that doesn’t match local intent, and KPIs that reward channel wins instead of customer wins. You’ll hear a practical blueprint for change: shared goals across physical and digital, a single planning rhythm for assortments, promos, and media, and cross‑functional squads where merchants, retail media strategists, and supply chain leaders work side by side on one customer view.

We also get specific about the data layer and operating cadence. Think unified product catalogs, privacy‑safe identity, blended attribution that spans online and store, and AI that senses demand, rebalances inventory, and adapts content in real time. Culture matters as much as tech, so we dig into incentives that eliminate channel conflict and teach teams to optimize for availability, price integrity, speed, and satisfaction. Move now and you gain agility and lower friction; wait and nimbler, digitally native competitors will lap you.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with your team, and leave a quick review so more retail leaders find it. Tell me: what’s the first silo you would unify this quarter?

Chapters

• 0:07 The Omnichannel Reality Check
• 0:23 Silos vs How People Actually Shop
• 1:09 Data That Shifts the Playbook
• 2:27 The Cost of Staying Fragmented
• 2:47 A Unified Operating Model
• 4:12 Act Now or Fall Behind

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Scott's Thoughts. I'm Scott Benedict. You know, retailers today face a hard truth. The way that most retail organizations are structured simply doesn't match the way a modern consumer shops. For decades, merchandising, marketing, and inventory teams have been organized in silos. One group for legacy retail stores, and another group for the digital business or for e-commerce, often with different promotional calendars, different KPIs or measures of success, and even in some cases, competing priorities. But consumers don't live in those silos. They discover products through digital touch points, compare products across both physical and digital platforms, and expect retailers to deliver seamlessly whether they buy in-store, online, or some combination thereof, like buying online and having it delivered locally to their home. The data on this topic, in recent studies, is pretty clear. In 2024, 76% of omnichannel growth in CPG came from e-commerce. Yet many retailers still plan their product assortments and their promotions with a store-first mentality. At Walmart, 68% of their growth came through digital channels, according to a recent report. And that's not just an outlier, that's increasingly the future across retail. And today, nearly 64% or more of all retail sales here in the U.S. are digitally influenced, meaning that digital discovery shapes both online and in-store outcomes or purchases. So here's the problem. If retailers continue running merchandising, marketing, and inventory as separate channels or separate worlds, if you will, they keep producing out-of-sync promotions, misaligned product assortments, and inventory decisions that don't reflect real consumer demand. That's not just inefficient, it's a recipe for lost sales, customer frustration, and ultimately irrelevance, in my view. The solution is urgent and straightforward in my mind. Reinvent these functions as an integrated omni-channel team. That means shared goals and KPIs across physical and digital touch points and eliminating this concept of channels and channel conflict. Unified planning cycles where assortments, promotions, and media strategies are aligned from the very beginning, from day one before a season or a calendar period even begins, has the cross-functional talent models where merchants, retail media strategists, supply chain leaders work side by side, supported by data and AI-driven insights. And perhaps most importantly, all these functions need to operate with a single view of the customer so that every decision, from product mix to pricing to inventory placement, is built around the shopper and not the channel. This isn't just an organizational tweak, in my review. It's a reinvention. It means moving away from bolt-on e-commerce teams and towards an operating model where digital is infused in every decision because digital is quite literally the new front door of retail. Retailers that act now will gain agility, reduce friction, and deliver the kind of seamless experiences that I believe modern shoppers demand. Those that wait risk being outpaced by competitors, especially the more nimble, digitally native brands that are already running circles around some of their legacy competitors. The bottom line is this: in my view, Omnichannel is not a project, it's a business model of the future in retailing. If you're still running merchandising, marketing, or inventory as disconnected, channel reliant functions, now is the time for you to reinvent for your customer, for the benefit of your teams, and for the future growth of your business. That's one of the things I've been thinking about. I'm Scott Benedict.