Last week I attended an event in New York focused on omni-channel and the future of the store. It was a private event, hosted by a vendor, and attended mostly by apparel retailers. I was there to talk about the future of the store, but then we opened a discussion and invited the attendees to share their experiences as well.

One thing that came up right away – and is usually one of the first things to come up – is how hard it is to measure cross-channel influence. How much do stores really influence online, and how much does online really influence stores? I shared the findings from RSR’s omni-channel strategy report that retailers seem to completely under-estimate digital’s influence on stores (and vice versa), to the tune of retailers believing online only influences about 30% of store sales, vs. companies like Forrester that estimate online influences as much as 60% or more of store sales.

One attendee offered up that his company had been going through an exercise of looking at trade area analytics – a way of looking at a trading area to understand not just store sales, but really looking at sales by customers who live in the trade area across channels to understand the overall health of that trading area, and how well assets – like stores – are supporting a trade area. He said they happened upon a trade area where the company had closed a store in the middle of the analysis period they were looking at, and found that when the store closed, online sales in that trade area also fell by 20%.

Twenty percent! That particular trade area took a double hit by closing that store – it lost the store sales, and it lost the visibility and presence in consumers’ minds to the point that it lost online sales too.

This retailer was lucky that they happened upon the right situation at the right time for the analysis they were conducting, or else they might not have seen this kind of drop at all. But now you have something to look at too – whether closing a store, as more retailers are doing lately, or opening a new one, make sure part of that process entails a before and after look of customers living in that trade area to see what kind of impact the store has on online sales.

It won’t definitively answer the question of how much each channel influences the other, but it will sure give you a good place to start! And if you find anything you can share (anonymously, if you choose) with me – please do so! I think it’s important to start a more pragmatic conversation about online/store influence, so that retailers can have a better understanding of the impact of their omni-channel strategy decisions.