Where omnichannel actually breaks down
The omnichannel gap in retail stores sits between what the system promises and what the store can physically deliver.
When a customer reserves online, real-time inventory visibility is assumed. But most retail stores operate on a morning stock count and spend the rest of the day selling blind, with no item-level localisation in the backroom or on the sales floor.
Look at what omnichannel now demands from a single store.
Reserve in one click, pick up when convenient. Try before buying. Return in-store what was bought online. Browse on a phone, complete the purchase in person.
Every one of those modes has a physical reality. A product needs to be found, picked, handed over. The system can promise availability. The store has to deliver it.
The tool that delivers this in a distribution centre — a WMS software with real-time tracking and item-level localisation — is absent or limited in most retail stores.
GSA stores run their backrooms with zero inventory tooling, even when those backrooms handle thousands of references daily.
GSS stores have clientelling systems. But clientelling locates a customer, not a product. Very few can tell you where a specific item sits at shelf or reserve level right now.
Julien Lavagne sees it across every deployment:
“A store running on accounting stock updated once in the morning, then selling on stale data for the rest of the day. The morning count says the product is there. The shelf says otherwise.”
We call this ghost inventory. Stock that shows up in the system but cannot be located on the floor. Purchased, received, somewhere in the building — and invisible.
What stores lose by selling blind
A customer walks in for a specific product. The stock file says it’s available. An associate heads to the backroom — no system, no mapping, nothing to point them in the right direction — and starts searching.
Over an hour later, the customer has left. The sale is gone.
The product was there the whole time.
Julien Lavagne doesn’t describe this as an edge case. It’s a daily pattern in stores without stock management tooling. Products never reach the shelf on time because nobody knows where they sit.
“Some customers say that it takes longer for inventory to move from the warehouse to the sales floor than it does from the supplier to the store.”
Every morning, store teams spend two hours restocking. Shelves still show gaps at opening. The right products don’t make it to the right place because the information to prioritise them doesn’t exist.
Julien’s estimate: “with stock visibility at product level, half of those daily stockouts disappear.”
The cost is not only commercial.
Retail runs at absenteeism rates that can reach 30% in some stores and some countries. Julien sees the link clearly: “when people lack the tools to do their job properly, they disengage. They burn out. They leave. The absence of working tools doesn’t cause the turnover alone — but it accelerates it in a sector already struggling to retain people.”
Then come the peaks. Back-to-school. Halloween. Christmas. We know what issues come with peaks.
Seasonality doesn’t create the problem. It makes it impossible to hide.
The cultural gap that keeps stores stuck
Stores were never designed for logistics. They were designed for selling.
The backroom was an afterthought — a place to receive pallets, not a managed logistics node. The people who run these sites are merchants. They were hired as merchants, trained as merchants, evaluated as merchants.
The rejection of inventory management tools in stores is not irrational. It’s consistent with decades of staffing, management, and identity.
Julien Lavagne has heard it in every first conversation with a retail team. There is no logistics in their DNA. And the objections follow the same pattern, regardless of the retailer:
- “We’re merchants, not warehouse operators.” The idea that their backroom should run like a distribution center feels like a misread of who they are.
- “The less we touch IT, the better.” A defensive posture toward any new system — not because the technology is wrong, but because the default position is to protect what already works, even when it doesn’t work well.
- “WMS? That’s a warehouse tool, not a store tool.” The word “warehouse” in WMS creates its own barrier. The operational problem — locating stock, managing flows, fulfilling orders — is identical whether the site is a DC or a store backroom. But the label pushes teams away before they’ve looked at the logic.
The same pattern plays out with operational workarounds and shadow IT. Teams build fixes around the gaps. The fixes become permanent. The real structural issue never gets named.
What breaks through this resistance is never technology enthusiasm.
It’s lost revenue. When someone puts a number on the stockouts — and shows what those stockouts cost every week — the identity objection loses its ground.
E.Leclerc Sélestat: what happened when stock became visible
E.Leclerc Sélestat had just doubled its sales floor to 4,800 sqm and added an offsite backroom. The store had stock. What it didn’t have was any way to know where that stock sat.
Customer complaints about product availability. Associates spending over an hour searching for a single product. Internal friction between teams working blind.
Then the store deployed stock localisation at product level.
Associates found products faster. Shelves stayed stocked longer. Click & Collect, which had never existed at this site, became operational within weeks.
The results speak for themselves:
- +18% revenue on DIY activity
- Click & Collect created from scratch
- NPS improved, with customer complaints on availability down
- 30 employees using the solution daily
- Working climate visibly improved — internal team friction reduced
The logical next step is ERP integration for tighter replenishment loops. The store WMS was the entry point, not the end point — a pattern we see consistently when inventory visibility becomes the foundation of a structured approach.