A shopper spots a jacket on their phone during lunch, checks that the store down the street has it in their size, reserves it, and tries it on after work before buying. No part of that felt remarkable to them — and that’s exactly the point. Bricks-and-clicks is the model that makes a journey like that feel like one smooth experience instead of two disconnected businesses bolted together.
What bricks-and-clicks means
Bricks-and-clicks describes a retailer that runs both physical stores (the “bricks”) and an online storefront (the “clicks”) as a single, connected operation. The phrase has been around since the dot-com era, but the idea matured into what most people now call omnichannel retail: inventory, pricing, customer data, and fulfillment that flow across both worlds rather than living in separate silos.
The distinction that matters isn’t whether a company has a website and a store — almost all of them do now. It’s whether those two channels actually talk to each other. A true bricks-and-clicks setup lets a customer start in one channel and finish in another without friction.
Why the model won
Pure e-commerce gives you reach and convenience but can’t offer the tactile, try-before-you-buy, take-it-home-today experience of a store. A standalone physical store gives you that experience but caps your audience at whoever can drive over. Bricks-and-clicks refuses to choose. Done well, it captures the strengths of each and uses one to cover the other’s weaknesses.
The mechanics that make this work are familiar to any shopper now:
- Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) — the convenience of ordering online with the immediacy of skipping shipping.
- Ship-from-store — turning physical locations into mini-distribution centers that get orders to nearby customers faster.
- In-store returns for online orders — removing the single biggest hesitation people have about buying online.
- Real-time inventory lookup — letting shoppers see what’s actually on the shelf before they leave home.
- Endless aisle — ordering an out-of-stock item from a store kiosk so a no-sale becomes a sale.
What it means for marketing
This is where bricks-and-clicks gets interesting from our side of the table. The model generates a connected view of the customer that neither channel could produce alone — and that view is marketing gold if you actually use it.
From what we’ve seen working with retail clients, the businesses that get the most out of this model treat the physical store as a data source, not just a sales floor. Loyalty signups, in-store purchases, and online browsing behavior stitched into one profile let you do things like retarget a shopper who looked at a product online with a “it’s in stock near you” message, or email a store regular about an online-exclusive drop. The channels stop competing for credit and start feeding each other.
The flip side — and the part clients underestimate — is attribution. When a customer researches online and buys in store, who gets credit for the sale? In our work with clients, untangling that is one of the hardest parts of running marketing for an omnichannel retailer, and getting it wrong leads teams to defund the very digital campaigns that are driving foot traffic. If your in-store sales aren’t connected back to the online touchpoints that influenced them, your reporting will quietly punish your best-performing channels.
What makes it hard
The model sounds tidy on a slide and is genuinely difficult to operate. A few of the recurring challenges:
- Unified inventory. Showing accurate, real-time stock across stores and the warehouse is a serious logistics problem, and nothing erodes trust faster than promising in-store pickup for an item that isn’t actually there.
- Consistent pricing and promotions. Customers notice instantly when the online price doesn’t match the shelf tag.
- Channel conflict. If store staff are bonused on in-store sales, they have little reason to encourage online orders — incentives have to be aligned or the model fights itself.
- One identity across channels. Recognizing the same person whether they’re logged in online or swiping a loyalty card in store is the foundation everything else depends on.
Frequently asked questions
Is bricks-and-clicks the same as omnichannel?
They’re closely related but not identical. Bricks-and-clicks specifically describes the combination of physical and online retail. Omnichannel is the broader discipline of integrating every channel — store, web, app, social, customer service — into one seamless experience. Most bricks-and-clicks retailers are pursuing omnichannel; the terms are often used interchangeably in practice.
How is it different from “clicks-and-mortar”?
They mean the same thing. Both describe a business that operates physical locations and an online presence together. “Clicks-and-mortar” is just a play on “bricks-and-mortar.”
Does a small retailer need all of this?
Not all at once. The highest-impact starting points are usually accurate online inventory tied to your stores and the ability to handle online returns in person. Those two alone remove most of the friction shoppers feel, and you can layer in pickup, ship-from-store, and connected loyalty as you grow.
Is the physical store becoming less important in this model?
The opposite, in many cases. As shipping costs and delivery expectations rise, stores are increasingly doing double duty as fulfillment and return hubs. The store’s role is shifting from “the only place you can buy” to a flexible node in a larger network — which often makes it more valuable, not less.
Related terms
- Omnichannel Retail — the broader strategy of unifying every customer channel, of which bricks-and-clicks is the store-plus-online piece.
- Click-and-Collect (BOPIS) — the buy-online, pick-up-in-store feature that defines much of the model in practice.
- Marketing Attribution — the challenge of crediting sales correctly when journeys cross between online and physical channels.
- Email Marketing — a key channel for connecting in-store loyalty data to online offers and vice versa.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) — tends to rise when shoppers engage across both channels rather than just one.
