Multichannel retailing is the process of selling products across multiple channels. For example, a retailer might have its products available to buy through a mobile app, social media platform, and online store.
Retailers experienced multichannel sales growth of more than 150% quarterly on average year over year. This retail strategy continues to accelerate as consumer behaviors evolve. By implementing unified commerce solutions, businesses are seeing an 8.9% equivalent uplift in annual sales on average.
Uncertain about whether you should expand your focus to sell on other channels? This guide shares the channels typically involved in a multichannel selling strategy, the operational challenges of selling multichannel, and brands that have succeeded when selling on other channels alongside an online store.
Table of contents
What is multichannel selling?
Multichannel retailing is a strategy that makes a business’s products available wherever a customer would want to buy them—both online and offline.
Brands with a multichannel selling strategy might sell products through their own ecommerce website, on marketplaces like Etsy, in a brick-and-mortar store, and through a mobile app. Each channel is equipped to handle purchasing.
In other words: multichannel blends the customer experience and gives consumers the choice to engage in the channel of their preference. Retailers don’t miss out on purchases outside of their own website.
The difference between single, multi- and omnichannel
Omnichannel retail is immersive, and puts the customer—not your product—at the core. Rather than treating channels as independent silos, omnichannel marketing merges the worlds of websites, emails, retargeted ads, social media marketing, and physical locations to show personalized offers, products, and messages.
Single channel retail is even simpler. It’s the basic act of selling through a single channel—for example, a brick-and-mortar store without an online website.
Aspects of multichannel retailing
Multiple channels
Multichannel retailing means selling where your customers already are—on your website, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Since 73% of shoppers use more than one channel when buying, you need to be visible in multiple places. Brands like Allbirds have leveraged this approach to drive omnichannel conversion growth by offering consistent experiences both online and in-store.
Customer-centricism
Today's shoppers want flexibility, like looking at products on their phone, buying on their computer, and picking up at a store. Multichannel selling focuses on making shopping easier for customers.
When they transitioned from ecommerce only to add brick-and-mortar stores, clothing brand Good American combined Shopify with their business software and saw 20% fewer returns in-store than online. They also kept customer satisfaction at 91.69%, showing how a smooth shopping experience builds loyalty.
Data collection
Selling in multiple places helps you understand how customers shop. Without connecting data from various channels, you miss important insights.
Shopify is the only platform in which all channels, systems, and customer data are integrated into a single, unified system. Swee Lee, a music retailer in Southeast Asia, used Shopify to connect their online and physical stores, helping them manage 60,000 different products more efficiently and fix customer problems in minutes instead of days.
Inventory management
Managing inventory across many sales channels gets complicated quickly. Without a central tracking system, you might oversell products or run out of stock.
Shopify's Stocky app helps store owners predict demand, track inventory, and automatically update stock levels everywhere. For instance, if a boutique sells their last medium-size black dress through Instagram, Shopify instantly updates their website and Amazon listings.
💡 Merchants using Shopify POS for both online and in-store sales see over 150% quarterly growth in sales volume with unified inventory management.
Types of sales channels
If you want to get the right product in front of the right customers at the right time, these are the different channels you should have in place.
Shopify offers more than 20 different sales channels under one easy-to-manage ecommerce software roof. Merchants can view sales by channel in their dashboard—so you can instantly compare performance on an apples-to-apples basis and uncover your most profitable sales channels.
- Online store: A virtual storefront where customers can directly visit your URL, browse products, and make purchases. While offering complete control over customer experience, there's a critical balance between functionality and performance, as even one-second loading delays can reduce conversions.
- Direct-to-consumer (DTC): A strategy that eliminates intermediaries by selling directly to end consumers, chosen by manufacturers for greater control over customer experience, supply chain, and profit margins. However, it requires significant marketing investment to build brand awareness.
- Social media channels: Social commerce platforms now facilitate complete purchasing journeys without redirecting to websites. While offering access to massive user bases, they typically take a percentage of sales.
- Online marketplaces: Platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart provide instant access to large audiences searching for products, in exchange for a revenue percentage. The primary risk is dependency on marketplace algorithms that can suddenly change visibility.
- Brick-and-mortar stores: Physical retail locations still appeal to nearly half of consumers, who tend to spend more when shopping in person. These can be flagship stores or partnerships with department stores, offering tangible experiences despite higher operating costs.
- Mobile commerce: Sales via mobile-friendly websites and apps are predicted to reach $2.5 trillion in sales by 2025. Many retailers develop custom apps that consumers use weekly for product discovery, loyalty programs, and special offers.
- Wholesale: A business model selling products in bulk at lower costs to other businesses through private portals. For companies like Laird Superfood, wholesale can become the dominant revenue channel, accounting for up to 75% of total sales.
“Being able to automate the wholesale process changes how we build our team. It prevents us from missing 2 am orders and keeps our customers from having to wait to place an order until we’re in the office. It just solves so many problems.”
—Luan Pham, CMO, Laird Superfood
The benefits of multichannel selling
Selling multichannel might sound like a logistical nightmare, but retailers rely on the strategy for many reasons. Here are the benefits of selling multichannel.
Wider audience reach
You can have the best ecommerce website in the world—one that delivers one-of-a-kind experiences to customers—but the only people you reach are those who know about your brand already. You need marketing and advertising campaigns to raise brand awareness.
Across each channel, calls to action and engaging ad copy can only work so well. Brands accept the fact that their content will not have the desired effect on everyone who sees it. Sometimes, it’s easier to convince potential customers to pay for your product on the channel they’re already on, as opposed to convincing them to pry themselves away and head to your website.
Improved customer experiences
“A single customer can learn about a business or make a single purchase over multiple channels, such as learning about a brand on Facebook and making a purchase on an ecommerce site,” says Gerrid Smith, CMO at Joy Organics.
It’s true: studies show that customers are using up to 20 channels and devices before adding an item to their online shopping cart—and they expect experiences to be consistent across them all.
Stronger customer loyalty
One study published by The International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management concluded that online loyalty is largely driven by offline loyalty. In other words: nail the experience you give to shoppers in your retail store. They’ll continue making purchases through online channels, increasing retention and customer lifetime value.
Multichannel retailers should focus on building trust and attachment toward the brand if they want to get online and offline loyalty. The efforts to build stronger bonds between the customer and the retail brand translate into higher loyalty, particularly toward the offline channels.
Reduced operational costs
Selling through multiple channels might seem like it would increase costs with marketplace fees, social media advertising, and app development expenses.
However, retailers using unified platforms like Shopify often find unexpected savings, reporting 36% improved total cost of ownership thanks to centralized tools that streamline operations and eliminate redundant systems. By managing inventory, orders, and customer data in one place, retailers can work more efficiently even while selling across more channels.
The challenges of multichannel selling (and how to overcome them)
Multichannel selling offers your customers a better overall experience as you mirror how they already shop. Even better, that strategy increases your profitability.
Though it presents some marketing and operational challenges, the solution is to centralize and streamline your multichannel back-end operations as much as possible while supporting your front-end user experience.
But without a proper multichannel retailing and marketing strategy, you could end up spreading your resources too thin, while hurting your customer experience in the process. Here are five challenges to consider and how to overcome them.
Marketing and promotion
Challenge: Even large brands can end up “peanut‑buttering” spend across channels instead of funding the customer journey. Saint Charles Pharmacy—a 138‑year‑old European health‑and‑beauty brand—found that its marketing budget was leaking into agency fees and emergency dev fixes rather than into campaigns.
Solution:
After migrating to Shopify Plus and connecting Klaviyo + Shopify Flow, Saint Charles rebuilt its spend model around funnel stages:
- Awareness: Story‑driven content and social ads attracted qualified traffic.
- Consideration & intent: On‑brand landing pages—created in‑house in minutes—captured emails and product interest.
- Conversion & loyalty: Automated email/retargeting flows nudged browsers back to checkout and rewarded repeat buyers.
Because marketers could launch tests without developer queues, every euro shifted from production overhead to media and optimization. Results within the first year:
- 20 % revenue lift
- 55 % share of returning customers (2× growth)
- 300 % jump in newsletter subscribers
Sales attribution
Challenge: Determining which channel deserves credit when multiple touchpoints contribute to a sale. Default last-touch attribution gives full credit to the final interaction, ignoring awareness and trust-building efforts.
Solution: Use Google Analytics' Conversion Paths report to understand customer journeys. Consider enterprise ecommerce solutions or apps like ATB: Attribution Reports for more accurate ROI measurement.
A seamless and straightforward checkout process can also improve sales and drive revenue growth. Shop Pay converts up to 50% better than a typical/guest checkout, outperforming other accelerated checkout solutions by up to 10%.
Inventory management
Challenge: Managing stock across channels without integrated data systems, especially as sales scale rapidly or split between different platforms
Solution: Implement an inventory management system before expanding channels to streamline fulfillment, prepare for unexpected sales spikes, and prevent inventory shortages when products sell simultaneously across platforms.
Pricing
Challenge: Maintaining consistent pricing across channels to prevent encouraging customers to buy from lower-margin platforms
Solution: Centralize through a product information management (PIM) system to control product data distribution. Solutions like Jasper and Salsify integrate with Shopify to update product information across all channels simultaneously.
Logistics
Challenge: Integrating sales data from multiple channels into a unified system for intelligent inventory allocation
Solution: Combine inventory management with a multichannel order management system to analyze which channels produce the highest-value customers. Consider partnering with a third-party logistics provider to manage stock synchronization across all channels.
Lean on a third-party logistics (3PL) partner who will manage all your channels, making sure stock is always accurate and synced live.
Multichannel selling software solutions
It’s easier to manage a multichannel retail strategy when you have tools replacing repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
These Shopify apps were hand-selected for their quality and ability to reduce complexity in your retail business, so you can focus on growth. Each works seamlessly with Shopify and has been approved at our highest technology standard:
- Endear: Personalized and trackable messaging that drives revenue. Send customers SMS and email messages that nudge them toward purchasing through your sales channels.
- Marsello: Create a customer loyalty program that incentivizes customers to purchase across online and offline channels.
- Happy Returns.: Handle customer returns through a branded online portal, regardless of which channel the item was purchased through.
- Reamaze: If you’re selling across several channels, that opens up several lines of communication with your customers. Manage them using Reamaze’s all-in-one customer service dashboard.
- Segments Analytics: See in-depth analytics for each sales channel in one report. Segment customers by their channel preference for personalized multichannel marketing.
Is multichannel selling right for your business?
The answer to that question depends on several factors: your business’s goals, marketing budget, and desire for control over product pricing and experiences.
Going to multichannel selling has helped retailers tap into established customer bases, reduce operational costs, and build loyalty with repeat customers. And, with processes and systems in place to manage multichannel sales, you can do most of it on autopilot.
Dig into your existing customer data if ecommerce is your only channel right now. How do shoppers discover your website? If it’s social media, Instagram Shops or Buyable Pins on Pinterest might be worth experimenting with. If it’s organic search, test whether listing your products on a marketplace helps you become more visible to a larger percentage of search traffic.
There is no rush to add multiple new channels to your strategy. Add one at a time. Nail the logistics of streamlining sales across several channels and go from there.
Multichannel retailing FAQ
What is meant by multichannel retailing?
Multichannel retailing is a type of retailing that involves selling products and services through multiple channels such as online, physical stores, catalogs, mobile, etc. It is a strategy used by retailers to increase their reach and customer base by allowing customers to shop in multiple ways.
What is an example of multichannel retailing?
An example of multichannel retailing is an online retailer that has both an ecommerce website and brick-and-mortar stores. The retailer offers customers the option to purchase products online, in-store, or through a mobile app. Customers can also choose to pick up their orders in-store or have them delivered to their home.
What is an example of a multichannel?
A multichannel example is a company that sells their products or services through multiple channels such as an online store, physical store, telephone, mail order, and email. This allows customers to purchase products or services in the way that is most convenient for them.
