Multichannel management is the art and science of decoding the nuances of who, what, where, when and why people are buying from you on each individual channel you sell on. It involves incorporating those insights into a comprehensive strategy to optimize the customer experience to increase sales.
It’s about creating balance, and understanding when and where to amplify visibility versus show restraint throughout your channel mix. This helps you avoid overwhelming your audience with repetitive content or burn your multichannel marketing dollars trying to convert people when they’re not interested.
The challenge? Siloed data causes stockouts on each channel. Messy promotion schedules mean one channel undercuts another. And the experience a buyer has on one platform is drastically different from those on another.
Multichannel ecommerce is not for the faint of heart, but with the steps outlined in this piece, you’ll understand how to break down the data found in each of those channels. Plus, you learn how to use those insights to make your multichannel business a more predictable, profit-generating machine.
Why multichannel management matters
Multichannel management gives customers the option to shop across your ecommerce website, social storefronts, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and smartphones—often with seamless online-to-offline (O2O) options that let them switch between channels without friction.
This strategy impacts revenue and margins because multichannel ecommerce reflects modern customer behavior. The average customer consults 10 different channels in a single purchase decision—up from just five in 2016. Multichannel management allows you to deliver consistent messaging, product details, and promotions wherever they interact.
Multichannel management also offers the ability to use data to tailor your approach depending on the channel. What works for TikTok audiences likely won’t get the highest conversions among email subscribers or in-store customers. Hands-on management highlights these discrepancies to squeeze the most value out of the resources you’re investing into each channel.
Just take it from NRBY Clothing. Multichannel shoppers who purchase both online and in-store represent just 2% of the brand’s total customer base but drive 8% of total net sales.
📚Learn: Multichannel vs. omnichannel: What’s the difference?
What multichannel management includes
Multichannel management is a two-pronged approach that covers:
- Channels: Select channels to prioritize—be that your online store, marketplace, social media platforms, retail partners, B2B storefront, distributors, brick-and-mortar locations, or the Shop app.
- Capabilities: Product, inventory, and order data must sync between these channels to prevent stockouts and maintain consistency. Combine this with unified customer profiles that show touchpoints across different channels during their customer journey. Ensure that customer behavior on one channel is reflected in what is recommended to them on another.
💡Tip: Shopify has a unified data model that brings together data from every sales channel into a single operating system. This centralized “business brain” enables seamless multichannel customer experiences while simplifying the operations required to make it happen.
Common multichannel management challenges at scale
Inventory and order orchestration issues
It takes an informed, strategically run operation to manage inventory and orders seamlessly across multiple platforms. Common obstacles include:
Stockouts/overstocking
A product might fly off the shelves in your retail store but be slow to shift online. A multichannel inventory management system (IMS) offers visibility over where your stock is and how many units you have on-hand. This allows you to better forecast demand, track stock levels, and transfer products between channels to optimize storage—and avoid losing sales (and customers) from stockouts.
On the flipside, inaccurate stock information can cause you to think you’re almost out of a product when you aren’t, leading to overstocking. Having too much product comes with its own associated costs, including the cost of storing the merchandise, and losing potential revenue when you have to heavily discount your product to avoid dead stock.
Fulfillment delays
Lack of real-time visibility in where orders are placed causes difficulty routing orders to the most efficient fulfillment location. This results in delays—which customers aren’t prepared to wait for. An omnichannel multichannel order management system (OMS) solves this.
Poor returns experience
Retailers often overlook the customer experience for post-purchase touchpoints such as returns, and a multichannel approach can add to the challenge. Customers are often asked to initiate returns through different portals, which damages their experience and deters 71% of buyers from repurchasing. Returned merchandise can also sit in limbo at siloed fulfillment centers and cause unnecessary stockouts.
Channel conflict, pricing, and promotion misalignment
Not all channels have equal value. For example, Amazon sales might drain inventory needed for high-margin wholesale orders or VIP direct-to-consumer (DTC) customers. Solve this with rule-based inventory allocation and safety stock guidelines that prioritize the highest-value channels—for example, by reserving 50 units for DTC only.
Similarly, think about the pricing and promotions you’re using to lure in customers across different channels. You may have disgruntled buyers if they purchase a product at full price through Amazon but see a hefty discount for the same item on your TikTok Shop. Use channel-specific pricing rules and set minimum advertised prices that partners must maintain to prevent undercutting.
Data and product information silos
Lack of real-time data synchronization between various sales channels can cause overselling, cancelled orders, and stockouts that impact the customer experience. When you have to tell a happy customer that their order is being refunded because they purchased something that’s out of stock, you don’t just lose the sale—you might lose the customer for good.
Similarly, if you’re updating product specifications or introducing a new SKU, manually updating each sales channel is cumbersome. A product information management (PIM) system acts as a database that adjusts product details—including pricing, imagery, and reviews—across each channel for consistency.
Reporting, attribution, and governance gaps
Sales channels typically have their data structure, reporting cadence, and rules. Metrics can be inconsistent or standardized—what counts as a conversion on TikTok might be different from Amazon’s classification. This makes it difficult to compare apples to apples.
There’s also the challenge of navigating how customers switch from one channel to another. They might discover your products on Pinterest, learn more on your website, and make their purchase through a retargeted email. Using only last-touch revenue attribution gives the final touchpoint credit for the sale, making email and social commerce appear less impactful than they really are.
💡Tip: Shopify’s unified data model funnels data from every sales channel back into one operating system. Display your most important metrics on one of more than 60 prebuilt reporting templates, or customize your own dashboards to analyze performance with Shopify Analytics.
A strategic framework for multichannel management
Map customer journeys and channel roles
Thorough understanding of your customers underpins every ecommerce strategy, and multichannel is no different. You need to know which channels a customer uses, the actions they take, and what they’re looking for at each stage of the funnel to reverse engineer a multichannel strategy that meets their needs.
Combine all available first-party data—such as sales data, behavior patterns, and market trends—to create a customer journey map. It should detail the channels and touchpoints your average buyer frequents during a purchase decision, categorized by their stage in the funnel.
Here’s what that might look like in practice:
- Awareness: The role of this channel is to introduce your brand to new audiences. Customers at this stage of the funnel might use social commerce platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can use strategies like influencer marketing campaigns to target these customers.
- Consideration: Buyers progress to this stage when they’re aware of a problem and begin searching for solutions. Use your ecommerce website to share detailed product descriptions. Combine this with comparison guides and reviews (both of which can help your content be picked up by AI shopping assistants like ChatGPT) and email campaigns.
- Acquisition: Buyers are ready to make a decision. Use retargeting ads, promotional offers, personalized email campaigns, and online marketplace listings to encourage a purchase.
- Purchase: Offer a seamless checkout experience on your ecommerce site, mobile app, or marketplaces, with options like guest checkout, multiple payment methods, and clear shipping timelines.
Choose a single source of truth and data model
Each platform has its own reporting method, cadence, and definition of popular metrics. For example, TikTok counts a video view whenever the content begins to play, while Facebook classes it as anything over three seconds.
Help yourself measure success by creating one single source of truth. Lean on a single unified data model that pulls data from multiple sales channels into a centralized repository that standardizes metrics.
This approach allows you to:
- Synchronize promotions across sales channels
- View real-time inventory availability and adjust allocations across multiple channels
- Ensure that customer behavior on one channel is reflected across all channels
- Run like-for-like comparisons using metrics from different platforms
Anita Yeh, director of retail operations at Monos, explains what this looks like in practice for the retail brand: “When our online team is servicing a guest browsing the website, they can see inventory available in a local store and hold it there for the customer to pick up that same day so they don't have to wait. Or if a retail associate is helping a customer find an out of stock item, they can see where we have it in a warehouse and get it shipped to them before their upcoming vacation.”
Design the operating model: Teams, SLAs, and workflows
Multichannel retail management doesn’t just detail the logistics of how you’ll sell products across different sales channels—it also considers internal workflows that prevent bottlenecks and improve efficiency as you operate.
Design a multichannel operating model that outlines:
- Who owns which channel: Document exactly which team is responsible for product content, inventory, marketing updates, merchandising, and customer service across each channel to prevent overlaps.
- The processes each channel team must follow: This includes how to implement listing new products, launching promotions, managing out-of-stocks, and handling returns—and the timing of all of those processes.
- Set service-level agreements (SLAs) for each channel: For example, you might aim to fulfill marketplace orders within six hours and orders from your ecommerce website within two hours.
💡Tip: Shopify Flow has prebuilt workflow automations to standardize multichannel campaigns. Can’t find a template that fits your particular use case? Describe it to Sidekick, the AI assistant that lives inside your Shopify admin, which will create a workflow in Flow for you.
Implement, test, and iterate using a phased roadmap
Diving headfirst and implementing a new sales channel without a comprehensive multichannel management strategy is risky. You could invest resources into a platform with diminishing returns, or underestimate the amount of time and energy you’ll need to maintain the channel in the long term.
Start small with just one channel you know your audience buys through. Test the core systems—including your OMS, IMS, and analytics platform—and workflows attached to them. This will highlight any potential errors or friction before you scale the channel and incorporate more into the mix.
Once this foundation works, layer in more sales channels using the insights you’ve learned from the pilot. Look for areas to optimize, whether that’s automating inventory forecasting or adjusting attribution models. This approach sets the stage for regular tests as part of a multichannel management strategy that’s proactive rather than reactive.
Building a unified commerce stack for multichannel management
Multichannel management focuses on selling across multiple separate channels, often with independent ecommerce operations for each. Omnichannel takes it further by integrating the customer experience across channels, so shopping feels seamless whether online, in a physical store, or on mobile.
Unified commerce goes a step beyond by centralizing all operations—inventory, orders, customer data, and fulfillment processes—into a single platform. It closes the gaps and data loss inherent in a fragmented tool stack. The unified data model acts as a centralized business “brain” with no middleware or custom integrations bogging you down. Less time spent on managing multichannel means more time you can spend innovating.
The result? Eliminated data silos, reduced operational overhead, improved accuracy, greater customer insights, and support to scale new channels without adding complexity or succumbing to human error.
Shopify is the only platform to do this natively. It unifies ecommerce, point of sale (POS), B2B, and marketplaces on a single infrastructure. An independent research firm found this approach results in major cost savings:
- Reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by 22% on average
- Has 20% faster implementation time
- Helps retailers experience 8.9% uplift in their GMV
“For years, there was a disconnect between our online business and our retail business,” says Curtis Ulrich, director of ecommerce at Aviator Nation. “Unifying our in-store and online sales with Shopify streamlined our operations and made it so much easier to gather the data we needed to provide our customers with exceptional experiences.”
When to add specialist tools
There comes a time when you’ll need extra functionality to keep online sales channels running efficiently. The following integrations offer this, while syncing with the real-data model that powers your unified commerce platform:
Warehouse management system (WMS)
A WMS helps manage warehouse operations including fulfillment, order routing, inventory management, and resource allocation. You’ll need one if you’re operating multiple warehouses or working with third-party logistics providers (3PLs), including services like Fulfilled by Amazon.
Product information management (PIM) system
A PIM acts as the single source of truth for all product data: titles, descriptions, images, attributes, sizing, compliance data, and translations. It’s essential if you’re managing complex product attributes—for example, beauty products in different shades—or have a fast-growing product catalog that’s difficult to maintain across multiple channels.
Customer data platform (CDP)
A CDP unifies customer data from all touchpoints—DTC, marketplaces, customer relationship management (CRM), POS, loyalty programs, email, and support—into a single customer profile. Shopify merchants have a CDP by default, which integrates with native segmentation and marketing automation features to deliver personalized omnichannel experiences at scale.
Multichannel management playbook for marketing leaders
Prioritize sales channels by ROI and total cost of ownership
Prioritize your time, budget, and creative energy by calculating each channel’s total cost of ownership relative to the results it brings.
For example, Amazon might account for a third of total sales but come with extra costs such as seller subscription, sponsored campaigns, and fulfillment fees. Combine the opportunity cost—particularly the lack of valuable customer data you’d need to personalize the customer experience in future—and you may realize Amazon is not as lucrative as you once thought.
On the other hand, you’ll still need to invest in platform subscription fees, marketing campaigns, and fulfillment when operating your own ecommerce platform. The major advantage is full control over customer data, brand experience, and margins—all of which have a greater return on investment (ROI) relative to the platform’s TCO.
The Conran Shop, for instance, migrated to Shopify and halved their total cost of ownership—while simultaneously recording a 54% increase in conversion rates.
“Our greatest frustration was seeing our budgets tied up in maintaining [our previous] platform, rather than channeling those resources into creating exceptional experiences for our customers,” says digital director Richard Voyce.
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FAQ on multichannel management
What is multichannel management in ecommerce?
Ecommerce multichannel management involves keeping inventory, pricing, promotions, and customer experience coordinated as you sell across different channels. The goal is to deliver a seamless, consistent brand experience and optimize operational efficiency.
How is multichannel management different from omnichannel and unified commerce?
Multichannel management describes how you’ll manage different sales channels in silos. Omnichannel is a step above and ties these channels together for a seamless customer experience, while unified commerce takes it a step further by unifying the back-end ecommerce operations required to offer those experiences.
What tools do retailers need for multichannel management?
The toolstack required for ecommerce multichannel management includes:
- Unified commerce platform
- Multichannel inventory management software
- Multichannel order management platform
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Product information management (PIM) system
- Analytics and business intelligence tools
How can large retailers reduce the cost of multichannel management?
Reduce the cost of multichannel management by calculating the TCO of each multichannel sales channel. Benchmark this against the results of a particular platform to prioritize your investment. For example, a marketplace might bring in $250,000 in sales but cost $50,000 to operate. Your own ecommerce platform might bring in less revenue but have significantly lower TCO, plus the ability to capture data and control the customer experience.
What KPIs should leadership track for multichannel performance?
Important KPIs for leaders to track when evaluating multichannel performance include:
- Total revenue by channel
- Customer acquisition costs
- Customer lifetime value
- Return on ad spend
- Order fulfillment time and accuracy
- Return rate
- Inventory turnover rate
- Channel-specific reviews
Align content, offers, and merchandising across channels
The channel a customer uses to buy shouldn’t influence the quality of their experience. For this to be consistent, align:
Content
Define brand tone, imagery rules, compliance language, and merchandising best practices so every channel reflects your brand identity. Have each channel team work from this playbook. While your TikTok content may be more casual in tone than your ecommerce site, straying too far can degrade your brand’s image.
Discounts and promotions
Work from a centralized pricing/promotions engine that supports time-based and channel-based rules. For example, if you’re launching a holiday promotion, the unified engine might display 40% discount codes that can be redeemed on Amazon until Black Friday with extended usage on your ecommerce website to encourage direct purchases. Avoid disappointing customers who miss out on a good price because they shopped on the wrong channel.
Merchandising
Use a PIM to store product attributes to ensure every channel pulls from the same product data. Update details inside the PIM and have them sync everywhere.
Build a measurement plan with shared KPIs and experiments
Implementing a new channel can be expensive. Judge whether it’s worth your while by benchmarking the following metrics across each channel to find winners:
- Total revenue by channel
- Average order value
- Gross margin
- Customer acquisition cost
- Customer lifetime value and repeat purchase rate
- Return on investment
- Inventory sell-through rate
- Return rate
Any amount of data is useless without critical analysis. Seek out correlations and causations and understand the “why” behind each data point. This helps you develop forecasting abilities and the ability to make “happy accidents” or successful experiments more consistent.
For example, does the unexpected spike in your website traffic correlate with your popup shop, or the introduction of TikTok Shop to your mix? Is there a relationship between buyer geography and sales channel? Are buyers from one channel more likely to repurchase or have a higher order value?
