In today’s fast-paced ecommerce landscape, lifestyle brands need to make browsing, buying and gifting simple and fast, or risk losing customers to their competitors. Creating a joined-up experience across physical stores and digital platforms is essential, as it can capture a customer’s habits to create a seamless and personalised user journey.
With the advancement of AI, online shopping is already becoming more tailored, and customers’ expectations are increasing in tandem, said Andrew Norman, senior vice president and general manager EMEA at Commerce, speaking at the eCommerce Expo in London in September. “Customers want to purchase however, wherever, whenever they want, and that provides a real challenge for brands, retailers, manufacturers and distributors.”
Lifestyle brands need to make browsing, buying and gifting simple
Lifestyle brand Muji recently underwent a large-scale digital transformation project to improve the online and in-store shopping experience for its European customers. Founded in Japan in 1980, it now has more than 1,000 brick-and-mortar stores across eight countries in Europe, and ships to 29 European countries.
Speaking to Norman, Chuan Huang, head of ecommerce at Muji Europe, said that it was essential that its new ecommerce platform – which is managed on Commerce’s solution BigCommerce – could be flexible and customisable, so that different features could be easily integrated to suit different markets. It was also important for the lifestyle brand, known for its simple yet elegant minimalist aesthetic, to make the most of its physical store presence. “Omnichannel is quite an important part of the strategy at Muji because we really value our retail store networks,” said Huang.
Based on Muji’s learnings, here are five ways to create a successful omnichannel experience for customers.
Unify customer data
To create a personalised experience, it is essential for brands to join up customer data between online channels and brick-and-mortar stores, generating a comprehensive profile of a customer’s shopping habits and preferences.
Muji is in the process of unifying its customer data to combine its large online subscriber database with data from its brick-and-mortar stores. “The idea is to consolidate different data sets into the system in a GDPR-compliant way,” said Huang. “Then we will be able to understand the data better and paint a full picture of how customers interact with Muji across channels.”
Investment into a customer data platform (CDP) can help to pull customer information together from multiple sources, including point of sale (POS) systems, websites, apps, chat tools and social media. Ensuring this data consolidation is done transparently and in line with data protection laws is essential. This approach is expected to help generate more conversions – for example, a sale in store could be followed up by an email suggesting other items the customer might like to buy online, along with a voucher code.
Integrate online and in-store inventories
Muji is in the process of rolling out a new POS system in-store over the next 12 months, which will connect its in-store and online inventories, helping to bridge the gap between physical and digital shopping.
It plans to incorporate an “endless aisle” strategy that will allow in-store customers to buy products that are either out of stock or not available in store – they will be able to order via a screen and simply tap their card to pay.
This integration is expected to provide valuable inventory insights, as it will give an indication of the local customer base’s buying habits. “It’s a very slick experience,” says Huang. “It will help us capture more online sales, and enable stores to optimise the range in stock.”
Reward loyalty in a coherent way
Reward cards and points have become a ubiquitous feature of shopping today. It’s crucial that retailers ensure their loyalty programmes enable customers to collect rewards, regardless of where they are shopping.
At present, customer offers are not yet consistent across channels at Muji. “Currently, the benefits and offers we provide to online customers are difficult to replicate in store,” said Huang. As part of its digital transformation, a new omnichannel loyalty programme is being developed to connect with the brand’s online storefront, in-store POS system and CRM system to join up customer loyalty data more coherently and “recognise customers, no matter where they shop with us”.
Gamification is also being explored as a way to make online shopping more fun, capture customers’ attention and encourage brand loyalty. Muji has been experimenting with engaging online prize-based experiences, says Huang, such as a “spin the wheel” function, where customers provide their contact information to spin a virtual wheel and win prizes such as discounts.
Increase the ease of gifting
It can be incredibly frustrating for customers to realise that a gift card they received for their birthday only works in one place. Until now, Muji’s gift cards could only be spent in store – it is now launching multi-channel gift cards that can be used across digital and physical touchpoints.
Mark Slocock, chief executive officer at the agency GPMD, which led the gift card redesign, said that it was necessary to create a central source of truth for gift card data across online and in store.
To achieve this, GPMD settled on using the Commerce platform for gift card purchase, then using Givex as the gift card solution in store and online, consolidating data into one system. Givex was already integrated into Commerce, which simplified the process. “We wanted to try to utilise existing systems as much as possible to minimise the development that we needed to do,” he said.
Slocock described gift cards as “surprisingly complex” – retailers need to consider multiple scenarios when implementing them, such as using a gift card for an entire or part purchase, using multiple gift cards for one purchase, refunds and allowing users to check their balance. Another consideration is revenue tracking, and whether it will be reflected at the point of purchase or the point of use – involving your finance team in this decision is essential to ensuring they can reconcile their accounts correctly, he said.
Use AI to create personalised experiences
With the acceleration of agentic commerce – where AI agents will be able to act independently to research, compare and buy the perfect product for consumers based on a simple search – retailers need to learn how to best incorporate the technology so they can create bespoke shopping experiences.
One way Muji is utilising it is through product discovery – it has integrated an AI-powered search engine called Klevu into its European ecommerce platform. This creates a highly personalised search function, by analysing customers’ previous behaviour and building a profile of preferences. Having already launched a chatbot, Muji is also looking at incorporating AI online sales agents.
The use of AI can help to connect online and in-store experiences – for example, customers could search for something they saw in store in just a few words or by uploading a photo, and the product discovery tool or AI sales agent could find it swiftly.
Huang discussed how in future, AI could also be used to generate product image assets, which could be used to depict different colours of the same style, where photography is not available. Those shopping in stores could then view a product they like in multiple colour variations.
Looking ahead: omnichannel as a continuous journey
Creating a seamless omnichannel experience is not a one-off project, but an ongoing process of connecting touchpoints, learning from customer behaviour, and evolving with technology. Muji’s approach shows that by combining data, AI and thoughtful integration of online and offline channels, brands can build experiences that feel effortless, personalised and truly customer-centric – keeping shoppers engaged wherever they choose to interact.
For more information please visit commerce.com/en-GB
In today’s fast-paced ecommerce landscape, lifestyle brands need to make browsing, buying and gifting simple and fast, or risk losing customers to their competitors. Creating a joined-up experience across physical stores and digital platforms is essential, as it can capture a customer’s habits to create a seamless and personalised user journey.
With the advancement of AI, online shopping is already becoming more tailored, and customers’ expectations are increasing in tandem, said Andrew Norman, senior vice president and general manager EMEA at Commerce, speaking at the eCommerce Expo in London in September. “Customers want to purchase however, wherever, whenever they want, and that provides a real challenge for brands, retailers, manufacturers and distributors.”
Lifestyle brands need to make browsing, buying and gifting simple
