Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

A large chasm still exists between the thinking of retail CEOs and E-Commerce execs. Case in point: Toys”R”Us CEO Jerry Storch, who gave a tradeshow keynote on Tuesday (Sept. 11) defending brick-and-mortar chains and promoting merged-channel, not just online, retail. That defense of bricks isn’t an issue. What’s worrisome is that Storch’s view of merged channel (a.k.a. omnichannel) is far behind what customers already expect—namely, that it’s all the same retailer, and online-versus-stores better not get in the way.

When it comes to merged-channel thinking, customers are already there. E-Commerce execs are getting there. But chain CEOs don’t get it yet.

Part of what Storch was trumpeting was a new Toys”R”Us service called “Ship To Store,” in which customers can order items online and have them shipped free to a store for pickup seven to 14 days later. OK, that’s great—but it’s not to be confused with a different Toys”R”Us program called “Buy Online, Pick Up In Store,” which lets customers shop online and then pick up the items in a store three hours later from the inventory that’s already in the store.

Yet a different soon-to-arrive (in October) Toys”R”Us feature is called “My Store” and lets customers browse the inventory in a particular store. And still another, non-customer-facing capability is called “Ship From Store,” which enables E-Commerce orders to be filled and shipped from a store’s inventory instead of from a distribution center.

Those are all useful functions (and they’re certainly not unique to Toys”R”Us). But the fact they all have their own names—sometimes confusingly similar names—that are being rattled off by a retail CEO demonstrates something is wrong.

Customers won’t remember the names of all those services, which won’t be the same at Toys”R”Us and other chains anyway. (Try this: Without looking back, try to remember what the difference was between “Ship To Store,” “Buy Online, Pick Up In Store” and “Ship From Store.” And good luck with that.)

For customers, the chain is the chain, online or in-store. They want to buy the product and either pick it up or have it delivered. That’s all. They don’t know or care where the product comes from—their local store, a DC, some other store—just how long it will take to arrive either at a store or a delivery address. Customers especially don’t

care what the name is for some element of that process—any more than they care what SKU or DC or POS mean.

And that’s true whatever online/in-store lines they cross.