Ageing legacy information systems could well represent a barrier to growth for retailers, a new study shows.
Research by Retail Systems Research (RSR), commissioned by IBM and SAP, indicates that retailers are struggling to serve cross-channel shoppers because of disparate information systems, which could threaten both annual results and the rapid growth of the online channel.
Finding the Integrated Multi-Channel Retailer: Benchmark Study 2008 states that retailers have improved the alignment of customer service processes with evolving shopping behaviour, but redundant processes and unintegrated systems could push costs up in the future as e-commerce sales increase.
Brian Kilcourse, RSR managing partner and author of the report, commented "Improving systems to ensure that product, customer, and inventory information is timely, accurate, and available to all the channels is a key component of that, in order to enable cross-channel ordering and fulfillment."
The US National Retail Federation forecasts overall retail sales growth of 3.5 per cent in 2008, while the Census Bureau predicts that e-commerce sales will increase by 17 per cent over the year and by 70 per cent over the next five years.
A recent study by Piper Jaffray suggested that 12 per cent of web shoppers plan to purchase more discretionary goods online this year, 55 per cent plan to purchase the same amount and 33 per cent expect to purchase fewer discretionary goods.
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