For several years, retailers have invested heavily in delivering an omnichannel experience: online purchasing, in-store pickup, fast delivery, inventory visibility, simplified returns and mobile experience.
Today, these features no longer represent a competitive advantage. They have become baseline expectations.
The real challenge facing Canadian retail has shifted. Consumers can easily find information, compare products, check stock and buy wherever they want. Yet they hesitate more, compare more and abandon purchases more easily when faced with too many choices, a lack of guidance, or a fragmented experience.
Omnichannel has largely resolved the technical friction points of the shopping journey. However, it has not eliminated the main friction that remains today: the difficulty of making a decision.
These findings come from the Omnichannel Barometer developed by Sid Lee and Haigo, which assesses the maturity of customer experience across multiple industries in Canada.
The analysis draws on a combination of field research and real-world experience testing, covering 82 evaluation criteria, to understand how consumers actually experience their journey, from discovery through to purchase and the in-store experience.
What the Barometer reveals across industries:
While the challenges vary from sector to sector, one trend stands out: consumers have access to all the information they need, but companies still struggle to turn that information into a decision.
- Beauty: digital inspires and informs, but the final decision remains deeply sensory. The challenge is creating continuity between digital experiences and the in-store experience.
- Automotive: consumers start their journey online, but often have to start over at each step, between manufacturers, dealers, financing and after-sales service.
- Home renovation: consumers think in terms of projects, while purchase journeys are still largely organized around products rather than the needs they’re meant to fulfill.
- Sportswear: consumers are more informed than ever, but the sheer volume of options makes decisions harder and increases hesitation.
- Furniture: all the information is available, but consumers lack the tools to compare options and picture them in their own space.
- Retail (general): retailers offer a multitude of products and services, but journeys remain largely uniform and poorly personalized to consumers’ actual needs.
Across all sectors studied, one conclusion stands out: the brands delivering the best experiences are no longer simply the ones with the most touchpoints. They’re the ones that succeed in connecting the different stages of the journey, making information genuinely useful at the moment of decision, reducing doubt throughout the purchase process and maintaining a consistent experience between digital and in-store.
The full Barometer can be downloaded here.
In an interview with Retail Insider, Guewen Loussouarn, CEO of Haigo, spoke about the issue.
Question: Your report argues that omnichannel is now table stakes rather than a differentiator. What specific evidence from the Barometer convinced you that the competitive battleground has shifted from access and convenience to helping consumers make decisions?
Answer: Our 70 extensive shopping sessions, online and in store, across all major retailers in Canada showed us that the basics were fully fixed.
Consumers can:
● Find the nearest store
● Check if the product is sold there
● Access key product information everywhere
● Access their purchase history from anywhere
The e-commerce and in-store systems and data are connected, the technical barrier has fallen. But once the infrastructure is fixed, you need to go back to the experience itself: How do you put all the data in motion and in context to help the consumer make a decision? What features or information are really useful?
For example: if I am in the middle of a DIY project, I want to know everything about a specific piece of equipment.
● Is it useful for my particular project and level of expertise?
● This goes beyond the product description, and requires advice from experts from the retailer, or reviews from other consumers with similar interests and profiles.
Can I get it right now?
● If I’m looking online, I need the exact stock and to put it aside for me so I don’t waste a store trip to see how it actually looks and ask questions to an expert.
● If I’m already in the store and it’s not available, I want it to be delivered extra quickly or to pick it up from another store.
These simple examples showcase that Omnichannel is not only about having the information in the system, but to really engineer it into services that make sense from a consumer point of view, to help from Discovery to Purchase, and even further, to Use.
Q: Across the industries you studied, what are the most effective examples of retailers reducing “decision friction,” and what practical strategies should Canadian retailers prioritize over the next 12 to 24 months?
A: In the report, for each industry, we give a clear vision of the “must haves” and the potential delighters.
This being said, on decision making, Automotive and Beauty retailers are standing out, for two different reasons.
Beauty: Helping consumers make the right choice
In the Beauty sector, top retailers have cracked the “fit” aspect of decision making. They create assurance that you’ll make the right choice.
Online product pages are built to make consumers clearly understand if the product is for you or not.
With:
● Reviews filterable by skin type
● Ingredient benefits explained in simple words
● Smart integration of AI for try on or to check the compatibility with other products you already have In store, sales assistants are called Beauty Advisors for a clear reason: they are here to help and get everything they need to make it personal.
They know about the trends every day to anticipate client requests, can access the list of products you already bought to check for compatibility, order anything for you to get delivered at home… from a mobile phone that they have with them on the floor.
Automotive: Supporting a major decision
For Automotive, top performers are great to help you understand all the features and make your car truly your own.
They help you make a big and costly decision that is not only about a purchase, but a project for years.
Online, the mix of technical and inspirational content is handled perfectly, you can prepare your store visit with easy to use configurators, and even plan for financing. This makes the in store experience a special moment where the sales team are companions who know why you are here, as a prepared confirmation point.
Q: The research found different pain points in sectors like beauty, automotive, furniture and home renovation. Which industry is currently doing the best job of connecting the digital and in-store experience, and what lessons can other retailers learn from it?
A: Beauty and Automotive are standing out because you can feel that the omnichannel experience has been designed to be omnichannel.
Many retailers had a store and an e-commerce strategy, with specific directors who sometimes had conflictual objectives (each online sale could be considered a stealth from a store sale).
If it seems like data and tech infrastructure are not siloed anymore, the organization silos are still visible.
A best practice we are seeing is the rise of Chief Omnichannel Officers inside the most mature retailers.
At the crossroads of marketing, customer experience and tech, these roles connect the dots naturally.
Consumers don’t want to shop online or in store, their journey is not linear and in the store, they will continue to check on their mobile for comparison, reviews or pricing.
Internal silos and scopes should not create complexity in this context.
The other thing we noted is that not all store teams are equipped well to answer consumer needs.
Sometimes they share an old computer with an antique system to check stock, prices or product specifications.
If the consumer can get the information on his mobile before your salesperson on the floor, or if the conclusion of an in-store discussion is that the person you’re talking to cannot order for you or suggest the closest store that has the product in stock, it’s not telling a good story.
The omnichannel experience should be as fluid for the consumer as it should be for the floor teams.
Finally, we noticed that the brands mastering omnichannel understood that the human side of retail has to live across the whole experience. Just as consumers expect the store teams to be available, expert and kind, they want part of this human expertise and empathy to be accessible online.
Reviews and advice on how to use the product by a real team member or the ability to book a video call or an in-store appointment can make a lot of difference to bridge the online and store experience, but also to create brand preference.
Q: Personalization has been a retail buzzword for years, yet your findings suggest many customer journeys remain generic. What’s preventing retailers from delivering truly personalized decision support, and how can they overcome those barriers?
A: The key to personalization is data collection, analysis and activation across all channels. Yet, consumers are now expecting what we call a “data dividend”: as a brand, you have to demonstrate why consumers shall give you access to your information or just log in to your account.
The consumer journey mixes several devices and can take several days:
I start a LLM (Large Language Model) search on my personal mobile during my commute to work, check the brand website on my professional laptop during lunch break, go in store to look at the product for real,
then make my decision on the family laptop with my partner before buying from the store that has the product in stock the next weekend, and in between I might have adblocked remarketing banners on my social feeds.
Three different digital devices were used, brand website and LLM were leveraged, two different stores were visited, many digital ads didn’t get interactions… that’s a lot of reasons for the retailer to lose track of where you are in the journey and what you are exactly looking for.
The key is therefore to build trust through transparency and recognition to get the authorization to access the data which will fuel personalisation.
It’s another basic of retail which needs to be done well across all channels: the good old loyalty account and its benefits.
Amongst our 82 evaluation criteria, several are directly related to it and the most liked by consumers is the ability to pay with loyalty points, online or in store.
Also, personalization is expected by consumers as a perk, not as a marketing trick. There is more perceived value for the consumer when they are shown really complementary products after they visited a few pages than when you offer them 5% off if they subscribe to your newsletter straight away when they land on your homepage, and you don’t know why they are here.
That’s why our CX approach aims at finding the right balance between the consumer and the brand interests.
Q: As AI-powered shopping assistants, recommendation engines and conversational commerce become more common, how do you see these technologies changing the customer decision-making process, and where do you think Canadian retailers are still underestimating their potential?
A: Only 53% of the shopping sessions we did in Canada showcased a minimal offering of AI via a chatbot, so it’s not as common as expected.
This being said, understanding why and how consumers are using LLMs in their journey is a big topic we have been tackling with various retailers recently, and we are thinking about creating a “Prompt Index” to publicly share useful learnings across industries.
What we learned is that consumers from all ages and digital maturity are using more and more public LLMs for discovery, comparison, price hunting and usage advice.
If we go back to the personalization topic, it’s easy to understand why.
LLMs are capturing a big chunk of the intent and consumer knowledge that make them very relevant and trustworthy.
Examples:
● In beauty, it knows your skin type and the kind of look you appreciate.
● In grocery, it’s the recipes you like.
● In renovation, it helped you shape your project and understood your level of expertise from the tutorials you asked it to provide.
ChatGPT or Gemini are available 24/7 and you can ask them questions with no shame of being judged or no doubt that you are being tricked to buy something you don’t need or that the salesperson has an incentive to sell you right now (yet).
From a consumer perspective, it’s powerful. But retailers have several advantages over LLMs that they can play well.
First, in their respective sector, they have the best first party data from providers, experts and consumer reviews.
In their field, retailers will always be more specialized than a generalist generative AI.
Second, they manage the full process, including loyalty rewards that are very valuable for the consumers, and the delivery or pick up process that can be a real pain point if not done well.
Third, retail is and will always be a human business, and Canadian shoppers value this aspect a lot.
The paradox of the frictionless experience that AI could provide is that it doesn’t create emotions, memories, nor brand preference.
At best, LLMs will be personal shopping assistants, but consumers still appreciate the basics and foundations of retail:
● The service
● The ability to see and test the product
● The conversation with an expert
The omnichannel challenge is therefore to make these traits available anywhere and anytime.As the tech is now mature, the service layer can be properly improved, with the know-how that retailers have since decades.
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