Like many revolutions, the one in retail appears to have come full circle: Alibaba, having spearheaded online shopping in China, is buying physical stores.

Alibaba’s $2.6bn plan to take leading domestic department store Intime private underlines the dilemma being faced by the hordes of disrupters: how to blur the lines between online and offline shopping, and create a model that keeps the fun and feel of shopping, while letting retailers and brands collate the big data that enable them to sell more goods, more quickly and more profitably.

“Today we cannot just separate online and offline,” Daniel Zhang, Alibaba chief executive, told a panel at Davos last week. Even when people are shopping in malls, he pointed out, they are on their phones — literally on and offline simultaneously.