http://www.adweek.com/digital/personalization-is-a-priority-for-retailers-online-and-off-but-its-harder-than-it-looks-in-an-off-the-shelf-world/
As e-commerce alternatives continue to take market share from brick and mortar retailers, businesses are looking for ways to keep up. While Amazon and others can provide a personalized shopping experience informed by data on past purchases and viewing, brick and mortar retailers lack the data to emulate this experience.
In an effort to combat this, retailers are looking to merge the data-rich e-commerce universe with the 'white glove' touch of brick and mortar. The goal for these stores is not about product recommendations (that's easy), but about using data to provide an individualized experience more relevant to the consumer. So far, this ambitious goal has proved elusive. All too often, according to industry experts, companies want to do "sexy personalization stuff, but...haven't done the unsexy work of capturing, organizing and using customer data to create truly relevant experiences".
Ultimately this is less about e-commerce versus brick and mortar, and more about the challenge of uniting the two, so that when a consumer interacts with Macy's in-store and online they receive the same personalized experience informed by their behavior in each environment.
In my opinion, there is a market opportunity for a platform that marries in-store behavioral data with online interactions. (Perhaps it is as simply as tying a device ID or cookie ID to a credit card. Though smarter engineers than myself have probably thought of this and failed.) The company that is able to do so will fulfill a growing challenge faced by all business who have both e-commerce and brick and mortar.
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