The hybrid retail experience – our industry roundup

What is the “hybrid retail experience”? Shopify’s Satish Kanwar uses the term ‘hybrid retail’ to describe today’s customer journey, which blends the type of experiences you’d expect online with the offline world; such as monitoring which point of the purchase journey each customer is at when they visit a website and applying the same experience when they visit a brick-and-mortar store.

This is important because customers don’t care if they’re shopping online, offline, or both - they want a seamless journey, no matter what. Put simply, people don’t shop in channels. They just shop.

"Digital is about providing the tools to make the physical experience more agile. There is a new customer journey and retailers have a new task to deliver that customer experience."

- Polly Barnfield OBE, CEO, Maybe*

Polly continues to explain that "Our children can have variety at their fingertips through their online world. A physical experience needs to be able to deliver the same variety, but retailers today don’t deliver that. It requires retail to think even bigger. Physical experiences must have a feel-good factor, every place has to give you a good time and be different."

Watch this video from Shopify to see how they view the “hybrid retail experience”.