Sales channels must be integrated

While it’s true that every sales channel has its purpose, you shouldn’t think about channels in isolation. Instead, you should be constantly thinking about how to integrate them so that they support, and not cannibalize, each other.

This can take many different forms:

• Use your wholesale channel for most of your catalog and your DTC channel to sell only selected products, so that people still have a reason to shop there.
• Create clear paths from wholesale to DTC, e.g., by asking people to subscribe to your newsletter (through an insert) or register their product for warranty purposes.
• Create “unified” commerce experiences such as “buy online, pick up in-store”, “ship from store”, or “buy online, return in-store.”

The idea is to let each channel do what it does best but, at the same time, create synergies so that customers can actually experience the whole breadth of your brand’s value proposition.