Marketing Channels 8th Edition by Bert Rosenbloom

Exercise 3

Office Depot has almost 1,000 office superstores and a giant catalog of office supplies that it offers via mail order. Yet Office Depot also enables its customers to shop on the Internet. Its Web site offers virtually all of the products Office Depot carries in its stores and catalog and guarantees next-day delivery to most locations in the United States with no delivery charge on orders over $50. Online order tracking is available, and customized ordering, which takes into account the historical patterns of an individual customer's product purchases, is also a feature of Office Depot's Internet-based channel.
What do you see as the advantages of Office Depot's multichannel strategy? Are there any disadvantages?