Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Disentangling this process is impossible, but more than that, it’s not what you want. Every-channel-everywhere seems to get customers spending more. You want them more entangled, not less.

That means the idea of closing stores to match a sales shift to online is all wrong. Sure, if a store’s foot traffic is demonstrably dropping, that’s one thing—empty aisles probably mean it’s time to close or at least radically rethink that store. But a rise in online sales doesn’t mean customers are abandoning stores, or even that they’ve stopped shopping there. They’ve just stopped buying there.

That’s a problem for big chains—almost all are bricks-and-clicks retailers, but most haven’t figured out how to match up sales with costs when bricks and clicks are entangled. If the store is a crucial part of the online selling process, how do you account for the costs? Online will always look lower cost. But if cutting an apparently low-producing catalog business hurts a highly productive online business, your selling model isn’t complicated enough.

And showrooming? Here are another few details from the report: Amazon, that deadly chain-crushing juggernaut that steals store sales by getting customers to shop in-store and buy at Amazon online, had only 10 percent of U.S. online sales in 2010 (the most recent numbers for that in this report), and online is still just 5 percent of total U.S. retail in 2012, according to Citi’s estimates. Even if you leave out food, health and personal care, online is still only 11 percent. That puts Amazon’s total share in the very low single digits (around 1.1 percent), and its share of sales via showrooming from brick-and-mortar retailers is tiny compared to the threat from other store-bound retailers.

That doesn’t mean showrooming isn’t a problem. But the big problem isn’t showrooming—it’s when those showroom-shopping customers walk out of your store and buy from someone else. When they’re actually drifting away from your brand, that’s a major problem. But if you’ve got them sufficiently entangled in your merged-channel brand that they buy from your chain in some other way—in other words, the right type of showrooming—that’s just an accounting problem.

That’s a good problem to have—except now you have to explain it to your CFO, who has to explain it to analysts, so they can explain it to investors. Good luck with that one.