Retail channel integration: how do the metaverse impact the omnichannel strategy?

For the past two decades, computer-sciences have enabled brands and customers to evolve towards hybrid realities where entities interact with each other without necessarily being in presence of each other. Hyperrealities, hybrid realities, virtual worlds, augmented and virtual reality, extended reality and now metaverses represent the new reality of marketing (Azuma, 1997; Biocca, 1992; Bourlakis et al., 2009). In this new digital era, the so-called ‘brick-and-mortar' and ‘pure player' models have given the way to more interconnected marketplaces: the traditional store integrates technologies allowing the customer to search for information online while being in-store and vice-versa. From a marketing point of view, the customer journey has moved from a multichannel management towards an omnichannel perspective (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). In less than 10 years, numerous papers have been published on these topics enabling to deepen our knowledge on how to integrate the metaverses into marketing strategy and practices (Dwivedi et al. 2023). More recently, a journal dedicated to the understanding of ‘metaverse' has been developed (Journal of Metaverses) showing the a priori importance for the future of our world. From a retailing perspective, we need to anticipate how to "implement reality-enhancing technologies to achieve omnichannel strategies" (Hilken et al., 2022). Therefore, we posit the following research questions: how does the metaverses adds-up to the current retailing industry and can potentially modify the retailers' practices? How can the metaverse be efficiently integrated in an omnichannel retailing strategy?