Go direct, but at a cost
In the second strategy, retailers created their own app or website to reach customers directly. This enabled the retailer to control the end customer relationship and thus provide a differentiated experience.
However, the retailer needs to build or partner for the full-stack ecommerce capability to make the customer journey worthwhile. This makes the strategy expensive and relatively longer to execute.
Now, I am seeing a third viable option, conversational commerce, that retailers are leveraging to reach customers on the digital channel. As the name suggests, this involves selling by chatting or through conversations between buyers and sellers.