A retail chain general manager reviewing sales figures sees a contradictory picture: the online channel is growing at double digits while the same stores’ revenue per square metre is declining. The board asks — should we close stores? That is the wrong question. The right question is: what is the store actually for now, and how should it be redesigned to do that job well?
Omnichannel is not simply about giving customers the ability to shop online, in-store, or via a mobile app. It means those channels work in a coordinated way to produce a single, coherent customer experience rather than operating as independent silos. The difference is material: when a customer adds items to a cart online and then walks into a store, the sales associate should be able to see that cart. When a customer arrives with an online order to return, the transaction history should appear instantly. Delivering that coordination depends directly on the integration quality of the retailer’s ERP and point-of-sale systems.
The transformation of the physical store’s role can be read along three axes. The first is the experience axis: customers still want to touch, try, and feel a product before committing, particularly in furniture, apparel, cosmetics, and electronics. Shoppers who research online and buy in-store, or who browse in-store and order online, consistently show higher average basket values than single-channel buyers. The store is functioning as a showroom — and that function carries real commercial value. The second axis is fulfilment: the store is becoming one of the most efficient solutions to the last-mile logistics problem. Click-and-collect gives customers flexibility while reducing delivery cost for the retailer. The third axis is brand: digital advertising is scrolled past; an in-store experience stays in memory.
In Turkey’s retail sector, e-commerce penetration is rising sharply. The widespread adoption of smartphones and the strengthening of mobile payment infrastructure have fundamentally changed consumer behaviour. Younger shoppers compare prices on their phones while standing in the aisle, examine the product in person, and then place the order through a different platform on the same day. This behaviour pattern makes traditional performance metrics — evaluating a store solely on its direct sales target — increasingly inadequate. If a store is functioning as a customer acquisition point, how do you measure that contribution?
Store network decisions can no longer be made purely on rent cost and revenue per square metre. A proper total cost of ownership (TCO) calculation must include the store’s contribution to customer acquisition, savings on return logistics, and brand awareness impact. A store with modest direct revenue may still be commercially justified if a meaningful share of online orders in that region can be attributed to its presence. Performing that analysis requires CRM, ERP, and e-commerce platforms to produce shared data. A retailer that cannot track customer identity across channels or connect in-store behaviour to online behaviour simply cannot answer this question.
The practical difficulty starts precisely here. Many Turkish retail chains acquired their in-store systems and online platforms at different times, from different vendors. Inventory data is maintained in two separate systems; customer records overlap or fail to match; in-store point-of-sale and online payment processing run e-Fatura workflows independently. This architectural debt is the largest operational barrier to a functioning omnichannel strategy. Before launching an integration project, an honest assessment of existing systems’ data quality and integration capacity is essential — because omnichannel investment built on a flawed foundation consistently delivers ROI well below expectations.
As a decision-maker reviewing your store network, consider these questions before drawing conclusions. At which stage of the customer journey do your stores intervene — discovery, experience, purchase, or return? Is that stage the same across all locations, or does it differ by geography and catchment profile? Are you capturing in-store behavioural data — footfall, dwell time, product interaction — and using it analytically? Is your inventory visibility genuinely real-time across channels, or does it run on daily batch updates? The answers to these questions will not tell you whether the store’s role is shrinking. They will tell you how it is shifting and whether your organisation is ready for that shift. The physical store is not dying — but it cannot survive unchanged.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on April 30, 2018 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.