Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

A mess? Sure, and it’s one that’s almost impossible to explain to the customer. It looks for all the world like the associate is pointlessly lying and that Sears doesn’t actually have a working inventory system at all. But what’s the associate to do—tell the customer the product he wants is in the store, but he can’t have it?

Ironically, Sears solved this problem three years ago. In 2008, Sears Vice President of E-Commerce Imran Jooma was touting Web site kiosks in Sears stores. “For example, if a customer is in a Sears store and is looking to buy a DVD, and the product is not available, the customer can order the DVD from a computer kiosk in-store and the shipping fees are waived,” Jooma said.

Or, presumably, the customer could use the kiosk to order the item for in-store pickup.

Or the associate could use the kiosk to “buy” the item for the store for in-store pickup and then sell it to the customer. Yes, that’s almost as messy as trying to explain that there are two different types of inventory. The difference: The customer doesn’t really care which inventory the item came from. He’s just happy to have his dehumidifier.

Sears isn’t alone in failing to figure out that dueling channel inventories are bound to make customers unhappy. Best Buy, with its self-defeating online-veruss-in-store price-match policies, puts associates and customers in a similar position.

Unfortunately, resolving that conflict is both an IT and a business challenge. On the IT side, developing a single inventory system isn’t easy. It took Nordstrom four years to get a unified inventory system working. JCPenney will end up having taken about that long, too, when that chain’s enterprise-wide inventory system is complete. Both retailers say having a single view of inventory will deliver big advantages, both in-store and online. But getting there is a long haul.

Just as challenging is the fact that big retailers’ E-Commerce divisions are still typically competing with stores, each with separate performance goals and strategies. That made a certain amount of sense back when the two channels were completely separated. But those days are long gone. Now, with Web site kiosks, in-store pickup and the ability of one store to locate out-of-stock merchandise for a customer at another store and then sell it and have it shipped, those lines have effectively been obliterated.

Those dueling business units still exist, but only as bureaucratic process, not as retail reality. They may still make sense in terms of aging IT systems and management org charts.

But to customers and associates, they make no sense at all.