Retailers are facing a planning crisis and it’s hitting the bottom line. Planning has become the “new supply chain problem.” A few years ago, the question was “Where’s my inventory?” Today, it’s “Why do I have too much, not enough, and none of it where I need it?”

The old retail systems aren’t built for modern retail. Excel isn’t cutting it. And legacy tools, many over a decade old, can’t keep up with the way customers shop now.

In short, the cost of broken omnichannel planning isn’t just operational. It’s strategic. It shows up in every major metric that matters: margin, revenue, inventory productivity, and customer loyalty. And it’s why retailers are now rethinking planning as the core driver of performance and revenue, not just a backend process.

Why Omnichannel Planning Feels So Broken

Retailers were built for a world of linear planning: design, buy, allocate, sell. But customers don’t shop linearly anymore. They browse online, buy in-store, return elsewhere. And planning tools haven’t kept up. Here’s where it breaks down:

1. Inventory Visibility: You Can’t Plan What You Can’t See

Omnichannel only works when you know exactly what’s in stock, where it is, and what’s already committed to an order. But most retailers still struggle with fragmented inventory data. One system says the item is available in-store. Another says it’s already reserved for a ship-from-store order. The result? Stockouts, double-selling, and frustrated customers.

For planners, this disconnect means you’re making allocation and replenishment decisions on partial information. You can’t trust the data, so you hedge your bets and end up with too much of the wrong product in the wrong place.

2. Channel Attribution: Where Did the Sale Actually Happen?

Buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) is a great customer experience but a nightmare for attribution. Was that sale an ecomm success or a store sale? What about returns across channels? Or online orders fulfilled from stores?

If you don’t have clear logic for attributing demand, it throws off your forecasts. Store teams might appear underperforming when they’re actually fulfilling a chunk of digital demand. That leads to under-allocating to stores or overbuying for ecomm. Either way, your planning inputs are skewed.

3. Fulfillment Complexity: Great for Customers, Hard for Margins

Giving customers flexibility, ship-from-store, buy online, return in-store (BORIS), is now expected. But it creates complexity for inventory management and margin performance.

When you pull store inventory to fulfill online orders, it’s faster but more expensive. You also risk walking a customer into a store that’s out of what they wanted. Planners need to decide which inventory to reserve, where to place it, and how to adapt quickly. Excel and most legacy tools aren’t built to model fulfillment costs or support mid-season reallocation across channels. So planners resort to guesswork.

4. Too Much Data, Not Enough Time

Retailers have more data than ever: POS, ecomm, web traffic, returns, customer behavior. But most planning teams are still working in spreadsheets. They spend more time gathering and cleaning data than using it to make decisions.

The result? By the time a planner sees a demand spike, it’s too late to act. Or worse, they miss the signal entirely. Without real-time updates and integrated views, teams can’t respond fast enough to capitalize on changes in consumer behavior or mitigate inventory risks.

5. Siloed Teams: One Customer, Two Plans

Many retailers still split planning between store teams and digital teams. That leads to misaligned buys, duplicate inventory, and missed opportunities. For example, a merchant might buy deep into a product for ecomm, not knowing store planners already bought the same item for a local event.

These silos make it impossible to execute a cohesive strategy. You end up with two plans that compete with each other instead of supporting the customer journey. And in omnichannel retail, there’s only one customer so there should only be one plan.

Real-World Omnichannel Planning Failures in Fashion Retail

When omnichannel planning breaks down, retailers lose margin, customers leave, and operations stall. Here are some real examples of where poor planning led to major setbacks.

1. Express - Failure to Align with Consumer Trends: In April 2024, Express filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced the closure of over 100 stores across its Express and UpWest brands. The company struggled to adapt to changing consumer preferences and failed to integrate its online and offline channels effectively, leading to declining sales and financial instability. _{[source: Forbes]}

2. Forever 21 - Outpaced by Digital-First Competitors: Forever 21 filed for bankruptcy again in March 2025, leading to the closure of all 354 U.S. stores. The company cited intense competition from online fast-fashion retailers like Shein and Temu, declining mall traffic, and rising operational costs as key factors in its financial struggles. The lack of a robust omnichannel strategy contributed to its inability to compete effectively in the evolving retail landscape. _{[source: AP news]}

3. Hudson’s Bay - Struggled with Digital Integration: In 2025, Hudson’s Bay Company faced significant challenges due to its slow digital transformation and reliance on traditional department store models. The company’s failure to effectively integrate online and offline channels led to declining sales and store closures. This highlighted the importance of a cohesive omnichannel strategy in the evolving retail landscape. _{[source: NVFirm]}

These examples underscore the importance of effective omnichannel planning. Retailers must adapt to changing consumer behaviors and integrate their online and offline channels to remain competitive in today’s market.

It’s Not Just a Tech Problem. It’s an Industry Shift.

Many retailers are finally replacing their old planning tools. Some haven’t updated in 10+ years. Others just can’t handle today’s fulfillment mix. And almost all of them are realizing: omnichannel planning is now core to margin and revenue performance.

It’s not just about moving off Excel. It’s about building a modern, responsive planning stack that works across stores, ecomm, and hybrid fulfillment.

In recent years, retailers scaled back too much in stores and leaned too hard into ecomm. Now they can’t land inventory in the right place at the right time. That’s a planning problem.

What Good Omnichannel Planning Looks Like

Retailers who are getting omnichannel right aren’t just using better tools, they’re reconfiguring how they plan. Instead of reacting to problems, they’re setting up processes that drive margin, sell-through, and customer satisfaction from the start. Here’s what that looks like:

Merchandise Financial Planning & Open-to-Buy (OTB)

Retailers start with financial targets that cover all channels, not just stores or ecomm in isolation. They set total sales, margin, and inventory goals then distribute those targets by channel based on growth plans, historical mix, and fulfillment costs.

More importantly, they treat Open-to-Buy (OTB) as a dynamic number. When demand shifts for example, more online traffic than expected, they reallocate funds and adjust orders. Retailers who implement responsive OTB processes often see:

• Improvements in inventory turns
• Reduced markdowns
• More accurate in-season buys that protect margin

Assortment & Channel Planning

Instead of building separate assortments for each channel, strong omnichannel retailers start with a unified product strategy and localize from there. They group stores into clusters based on performance, customer profile, or region, then assign assortment depth and size curves accordingly.

They also evaluate which SKUs belong in-store, online, or both, and ensure digital-only styles are backed by sufficient inventory. The result:

• Higher full-price sell-through rates
• Fewer out-of-stocks in high-volume stores
• Improved SKU productivity across all channels

Demand Forecasting

Forecasting is no longer just based on last year’s numbers. Retailers are now layering in real-time signals, web traffic, weather patterns, promotional calendars, and social trends. Advanced forecasting processes combine those inputs into a single demand view across channels.

The result is a “unified demand signal” that informs financial plans, buys, and allocation decisions. Retailers using modern forecasting methods typically report:

• Forecast accuracy improvement
• Lower safety stock requirements
• Faster response to demand shifts, reducing reactive transfers or air freight costs

Allocation & Replenishment

Allocation today has to support flexibility. That means putting inventory where it can move whether that’s store shelves or fulfillment nodes. Retailers are balancing on-hand inventory for walk-in customers while reserving some for digital orders, BOPIS, or ship-from-store.

Strong allocation strategies also factor in size-level accuracy, regional preferences, and real-time sales performance. And replenishment is dynamic, not just weekly, but triggered by real sales signals.

When allocation and replenishment processes are integrated and responsive, retailers typically see:

• Reduction in out-of-stocks
• Higher inventory turnover
• Millions in margin retention from avoided markdowns

Legacy vs. Modern Omnichannel Planning

To better understand the gap between outdated planning approaches and what’s required today, the table below contrasts legacy retail planning with a modern, omnichannel model.

The Real Fix: Rethinking How Planning Gets Done

Omnichannel retail sounds simple: meet customers wherever they shop. But behind the scenes, it creates major complexity. Especially for merchandising and planning teams.

When inventory data is unreliable, when attribution is unclear, when teams are siloed or stuck in spreadsheets, the whole system breaks down. You miss forecasts. You overbuy in one channel and understock in another. You spend margin fixing problems that efficient planning could have prevented.

Poor omnichannel planning leads to stockouts, bloated inventory, and missed revenue. These aren’t one-off issues, they’re systemic failures that can spiral fast.

The fix isn’t just a new tool. It’s a new approach. Retailers need unified, channel-agnostic plans. Real-time visibility and data across the network. Demand forecasts that reflect how customers actually shop. And workflows that let teams move quickly when things change, because they will.

Fixing omnichannel means:

• Centralizing inventory data
• Aligning attribution and demand signals
• Planning cross-channel from a single source of truth
• Equipping teams with real-time workflows and scenario planning

The result: improved forecast accuracy, reduced markdowns, faster inventory turns and more responsive teams.

If your current planning process wasn’t built for omnichannel, it’s holding you back. Toolio helps teams get there faster with the visibility, speed, accuracy, and structure to plan more efficiently, react faster, and protect margin across all channels.

Want to see how it would look for your business? Speak to an expert at Toolio and see it in action for yourself!