The nature of retailing is changing. Retailers are under pressure to offer multiple retail channels and multiple fulfilment modes in order to satisfy very different customer journeys. Today’s retail customers want to be able to access information and make purchase decisions in whatever way and on whatever device they wish. They also want to receive their orders whenever, wherever, and however they wish. Traditionally all customers were satisfied from a network of bricks-and-mortar stores. The ‘Omni-Channel’ retailing landscape changes the nature and granularity of order fulfilment fundamentally.
Omni-Channel retailing is practice-led and retailers are experimenting, trialling, and implementing different solutions and systems, not always successfully. We first discuss different types of multi-channel retailing and provide a conceptual map for omni-channel order fulfilment decisions at strategic, operational, and tactical levels. The opportunities for both empirical OM research and modelling research are discussed. We illustrate models for one of the most popular modes of Omni-Channel fulfilment - ‘Buy-online-pickup-in-store’ (BOPS) – where retailers use their store network for fulfilment and advertise an ordering window with a guarantee of when their order will be available for collection, often the same day.