It’s 8:00 AM. A customer scrolls through your app while sipping coffee. They check if an item is available in a nearby store at lunch. By evening, they place an order for in-store pickup on their way home.
That’s a modern omnichannel retail experience in action.
It looks seamless on the surface, but behind the scenes, most brands struggle to make it work. The reason? Inventory is poorly managed, fulfillment is complex, legacy systems are inflexible, and customers are demanding more every day. Delivering a true omnichannel experience becomes quite difficult in these scenarios.
Below, we’ll explore the top omnichannel challenges facing retailers today and how Fluent is helping some of the biggest brands turn these problems into performance.
1. Customers See Stock That Isn’t There
Imagine a shopper finds the perfect item online and later finds it’s out of stock after placing the order. Or worse, they go to a store that was supposed to have it, and it’s not there.
This is one of the most frustrating omnichannel retail problems. It happens because systems aren’t connected in real-time.
How Fluent Fixes It: Fluent’s Big Inventory platform pulls inventory data from warehouses, stores, and third-party vendors. It gives a real-time view of what’s available. This keeps product listings accurate and prevents overselling.
Freedom Australia reduced order cancellations by 85% after switching to Fluent. (Source: FluentCommerce.com)
2. Fulfillment Is Complicated and Slow
A single order today might ship from a warehouse, get picked up in a store, or be split across multiple locations. Coordinating this is extremely difficult without intelligent systems.
How Fluent Fixes It: Fluent’s Order Orchestration engine chooses the best location to fulfill each item based on availability, speed, and cost. It easily supports BOPIS, ship-to-store, and ship-from-store models.
For example, retailers like ALDO could fulfill seven times more orders during peak sales without changing their operations.
3. Old Systems Slow Everything Down
Many retailers have rigid ERPs and outdated tech that can’t adapt to modern shopping habits. Adding new channels, carriers, or partners takes too long and costs too much.
How Fluent Fixes It: Omnichannel software solutions like Fluent are cloud-native platforms that connect easily with your existing systems. They support plug-and-play integrations with marketplaces, carrier services, and store systems, making it much faster to scale and adapt without replacing your entire tech stack.
4. Canceled Orders Are Hurting Brands
Canceled orders can feel like broken promises to your customers. They usually happen when inventory data is outdated or scattered across different systems.
How Fluent Fixes It: Fluent keeps all systems in sync. When a customer adds an item to their cart, the system confirms it’s available. This prevents orders from being accepted when they can’t be fulfilled.
More accurate data means fewer canceled orders and more satisfied customers. Retail omnichannel analytics can help achieve this.
5. Shipping Costs Are Out of Control
If we look into recent omnichannel retail trends, customers want fast and free shipping, but retailers are struggling to keep fulfillment costs under control. This is especially difficult during high-traffic periods like holiday sales.
How Fluent Fixes It: Fluent chooses the most efficient fulfillment option every time. Based on real-time data, it finds the fastest, most cost-effective way to deliver each order. During the holiday shopping season, Fluent processed over 675 orders per second without any downtime.
Why Fluent is More Than Just a Platform?
Fluent is more than a typical omni-channel retail software provider. It’s a modern omnichannel ecommerce solution built to solve today’s retail challenges.
Fluent helps brands create a flexible, scalable, and future-ready retail experience, from omnichannel analytics solutions to global fulfilment tools.
It gives retailers the confidence to expand quickly, deliver reliably, and stay competitive in a fast-changing world.
Final Thoughts
Running a modern retail business is more complex than ever. Brands constantly struggle with the challenges of omnichannel marketing, fragmented data, rising costs, and high customer expectations.
Fluent is built to solve all of these challenges.
If you’re ready to take your omnichannel retail strategy to the next level, Fluent offers the tools and technology you need. Whether you’re looking for smarter inventory, better fulfillment, or a faster path to scale, Fluent is the omni-channel eBusiness solutions provider that makes it all possible. Contact us for Fluent Commerce implementation!
Read Also: Want to Switch to Omnichannel Commerce? Here’s What You Should Know
FAQs
It refers to selling across online, mobile, and physical stores with a connected customer experience.
The system decides where and how an order should be fulfilled based on cost, speed, and location.
Yes. Fluent integrates with existing systems, so you don’t need to replace your core technology.
It syncs inventory data across channels in real-time, so customers only order what’s available.
Yes. It’s cloud-native and can handle thousands of orders per second, even during peak sales.
Ignitiv offers strategy, implementation, and integration services to help retailers adopt omnichannel retail solutions like Fluent faster and more effectively.
