What is unified commerce
Unified commerce is a strategy that enables a seamless shopping experience across all touchpoints while helping businesses to eliminate existing siloes between different business systems and sales channels. It integrates frontend experiences such as product discovery, retail journey, and customer interactions with backend processes such as order fulfillment and returns on a single cohesive platform. This helps create a unified experience for customers, business owners and staff.
There is a reason why unified commerce is more relevant today than it ever was. With changing purchase behaviors and a customer expectation for immediate solutions, retailers and businesses cannot simply rely on multichannel retail processes. A key problem that plagues commerce today is the fragmentation of processes, operations, and strategies. Although many businesses have moved from legacy tools to more modern solutions that sync data between channels and platforms, the results are far from satisfactory.
Unified commerce fills existing gaps and helps businesses to address unmet customer needs, enhance back operations, and scale at will.
Unified commerce vs. omnichannel
Omnichannel ensures all your sales channels communicate effectively. Unified commerce goes a step further by being customer-centric, seamlessly connecting all sales channels in real-time. This connection allows for a constant flow of data across different systems, improving the overall customer experience.
Omnichannel strategy ensures customers get a fluid and seamless shopping experience on any device or touchpoint. It eliminates data silos and ensures all customer interactions and behaviors are updated in real-time. This ensures a harmonious shopping and buying experience for customers.
While omnichannel focuses on the frontend or customer-facing side of a retail business, a unified commerce system goes a step further and ensures backend processes are omnichannel too.
In other words, a unified commerce system integrates all business processes to create a single source of truth that ensures businesses, their staff, and customers experience seamlessness and frictionless operations. Most importantly, unified commerce generates richer insights by integrating data from both the backend and frontend processes.
Importance of unified commerce for retail
Operational efficiency
The retail industry often struggles to meet consumer demand for an enhanced ed shopping experience. Most customers are now used to seamless shopping experiences across channels, and when retailers are unable to fulfill this key expectation, they often lose customers. Worse, the brand reputation may suffer as well. Unified commerce helps retail businesses to view and manage all data in real time on a single interface. This helps ensure that every department in the backend, from inventory management to order management, can work in symphony at all given times. Most importantly, a unified commerce system helps implement superior customer relationship management thanks to a unified customer view.
Multichannel integration
Multichannel retailing recognizes the need to make products available at different touchpoints. It helps ensure customers can purchase goods on every popular platform, enhancing product view and accessibility. However, this does not address the fact that customers often purchase offline at physical stores, too. Moreover, they may begin their journey at a particular touchpoint and end their shopping journey elsewhere. For instance, they may browse products on an e-commerce app but end up placing the order after viewing it at your physical store. If these diverse customer interactions with products are not accounted for, you will miss valuable opportunities to provide a seamless shopping experience. Integrating multiple channels helps ensure that customers can move seamlessly between touchpoints and complete their buying journey in a non-linear manner.
Real-time inventory across channels
As customer expectations evolve and competitors increasingly meet their demands, it becomes a business imperative to ensure that orders are fulfilled efficiently and seamlessly across touchpoints.
Unified commerce systems adopt an omnichannel strategy and ensure inventory is visible on all platforms in real-time. This helps retailers to manage their inventory and stock levels efficiently and ensure that issues related to understocking and overstocking are reduced.
Most importantly, customers will not return disappointed, and you will not miss out on any sales opportunity because of bottlenecks in inventory management.
Streamline complex order management
It's a well-known fact that orders are getting more diverse and complex in recent years. Customers simply do not follow a linear strategy to complete their buying journey. They often travel back and forth before randomly purchasing on a touchpoint that you may not be able to predict initially.
This causes complexities in order management as frontend processes are just a part of retail management. Backend processes such as procurement, tracking and fulfilling orders, and ensuring customers receive their products on time involve a number of steps. Unified commerce helps streamline complex order management by centralizing order processing across different sales channels.
It also enters all orders automatically and routes them through fulfillment centers and warehouses most efficiently. This helps minimize shopping costs and ensures customers can track their orders and receive timely updates. Unified commerce also enables you to manage returns and exchanges seamlessly, which reduces online complaints and negative reviews.
Seamless POS integration
An essential feature of unified commerce is an integrated POS that provides a consistent payment processing experience across all channels and touchpoints.
This helps ensure a consistent customer shopping experience while your staff gains access to a single view of all relevant data. Centralized data and unified inventory management help process payments quickly and easily, enabling a true omnichannel experience.
Please note that mere omnichannel tools tend to focus on frontend processes and do not support backend processes extensively. A unified commerce system helps tie various frontend and backend processes together while ensuring seamless payment processing across touchpoints and channels. This also helps you gain insights related to sales, revenue figures, and certain unique customer preferences.
Flexible customer journey
By definition, unified commerce enables a coordinated and cohesive buying journey for all customers.
This ensures they can start from where they left off, regardless of the touchpoints. All data is synced and updated in real-time so customers do not have to enter or reenter information. This consistent shopping experience ensures customers get a consistent brand experience online, offline, and on social media.
Most importantly, it enables a flexible customer journey. You can easily support two popular flexible buying strategies: buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) and buy online, return in-store (BORIS). The result is a happy and satisfied customer who will not stray away from your brand to your competitor's.
Unified data
The most important feature of a unified commerce system is its ability to integrate data from all sources and deliver accurate and relevant analytics.
Businesses can quickly understand customer behavior and preferences and make decisions that lead to better marketing results. Most importantly, unified commerce creates a single source truth that also helps rev up backend processes.
This ensures that you can streamline disparate processes and identify opportunities for growth, enhanced efficiency, and reduced expenses. Finally, unified data eliminates confusion and errors and helps you provide the best customer service possible.
