Consistency

Suppliers should plan for consistency of their brand, customer information and the customer experience across different channels. Scenario planning is also useful here. Channel synchronization may be used to deliver a consistent customer experience. Consumers can become frustrated when suppliers' online channels only sell a selection of their offline products or services, or altogether different products or services. However, many suppliers currently offer either the same or fewer product categories online as in other channels, and 58 per cent say that their sites offer a narrower assortment within those categories. ^[7] However, there might be very sound commercial reasons for this: for example, delivery costs and risk of customers making poor choices, leading to high returns ratios. We suggest that to improve consistency in the product/services offering, suppliers should stage online product roll-outs, first focusing on depth in their core product/services categories, then add breadth through new complementary products, and finally, once the depth and breadth of products online reach critical mass, suppliers should introduce not-so-obvious categories and services both online and offline. Alternatively, the online and offline channels should be clearly positioned as different.