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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Schedule a no-obligation call with one of our experts to get expert advice on how Priority can help streamline your operations.
A Central Data Hub is an essential component of a unified commerce solution.
It acts as a repository of all data that is updated in real-time. It forms the backbone of a cohesive business platform that enables retail businesses to implement successful marketing and sales campaigns and ensure that checkouts take place smoothly.
In addition to providing customers with a seamless shopping experience, a Central Data Hub acts as a historical treasure trove of data that updates changes in real-time. This ensures that a single source of truth is available to all departments, both in the front end and the back end.
Consequently, businesses can implement an omnichannel strategy quickly and ensure revenue growth.
An Omnichannel Order Management System (OMS) is a vital module within a unified commerce system.
It helps you fulfill orders quickly and easily across multiple touchpoints without friction. This results in enhanced customer experience and a reduction in churn rate. An OMS is essential to process orders seamlessly across touchpoints.
You will have 360-degree visibility of customer profiles, product locations, and different backend processes. As a result, you can route orders and allocate resources efficiently while supporting different fulfillment options.
Like an Omnichannel Order Management System, an Omnichannel Inventory Management System further supports an omnichannel ecosystem, allowing retailers and businesses to manage their stock efficiently across locations and platforms.
For instance, retailers with multiple warehouses and distribution centers can quickly and efficiently manage all their inventory in the backend.
Storefront staff can view the exact number of products available at each location and ensure that the prices and discounts offered do not differ across touchpoints. An Omnichannel Inventory Management System is essential to keep e-commerce and physical retail sales in sync and ensure smooth movement of products.
A unified commerce system is a holistic solution that helps businesses to manage backend processes while ensuring that customer satisfaction remains at impressive levels. Consequently, an important component of a unified commerce system is a CRM.
The CRM is constantly updated with each customer interaction and changes in behavior so that the latest and the most relevant data is available to all parties concerned. Thanks to a unified customer profile, personalized shopping experiences are made easy and accessible across touchpoints.
This results in enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced churn rates.
Unified Commerce Solutions has powerful e-commerce features that help retailers take their online business to the next level.
In addition to being the primary interface for customers to browse and shop for products, it also synchronizes with backend modules to display a unified product catalog that has the latest and the most accurate product descriptions, images, and pricing.
Customers can easily check availability and manage their buying journey across touchpoints. A unified commerce solution also comes with a powerful personalization and recommendations engine that fetches the most relevant products to customers based on their user behavior and previous interactions.
It also makes payments easy and quick, while ensuring you adhere to regulatory compliances.
While investing in a unified commerce solution, ensure it comes with an advanced point-of-sales (POS) system.
A versatile POS system that supports an omnichannel retail strategy ensures that your staff can process payments anytime, anywhere. In addition, it helps your backend staff procure raw materials and pay for them without difficulties.
An integrated POS system takes matters a step ahead, eliminating the need for manual payment details entry. It accepts and processes all types of payments on the system without sending customers' information to third-party services. Hence, the trick is to look for a unified commerce system with an integrated POS system.
Regardless of their size, all retail businesses benefit from a unified commerce strategy. It helps them synthesize frontend operations with backend processes, resulting in a cohesive and synchronized business strategy. Both small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and large retail enterprises can implement a unified commerce strategy to enhance operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and revenue figures.
Retailers using an omnichannel tool to manage their frontend and customer-facing processes can upgrade to a unified commerce strategy. This strategy helps them more efficiently synchronize their backend processes, such as logistics management, inventory management, and order fulfillment. A unified commerce strategy not only enhances customer satisfaction but also applies the same omnichannel philosophy to backend processes.
Implementing unified commerce is easy as long as you're well prepared for it. A step-by-step approach ensures that your implementation is successful and produces the results you expect.
The first step towards moving towards a unified commerce strategy is to understand how your business fares at the moment in all respects. To do that, here are some tips:
Once you have identified your strengths and weaknesses, it is important to understand how you can fix existing gaps with technology and improvements to processes. Here's how to do that:
Once you have a list of goals to achieve, the next step is to find a product that will solve all your problems. Here's how to choose a unified commerce system:
Before implementing a unified commerce strategy, ensuring that your existing data is safe and well taken care of is crucial. Here's what you have to do:
Now that all your data is on your new unified commerce system, it is time to use it. Deployment begins the moment you decide to use it. Here's what to do:
Once your unified commerce system has been deployed, it is vital to ensure that your employees use it correctly. To ensure this, here are some tips:
Now that your employees have begun to use the new unified commerce tool, you must start to see drastic improvements. However, monitoring and tracking the system's performance is essential.
Do the following:
Unified commerce is a philosophy that builds on an omnichannel strategy but adopts newer, more efficient trends. It emphasizes the importance of synchronizing data and business operations and unifying both customer experiences and backend processes. Consequently, the future trends in unified commerce will be dominated by machine learning and voice commerce, which have begun to influence how businesses are run and customers shop.
In addition, privacy and security will take center stage, as shall sustainability and ethical business practices. Most importantly, a unified commerce strategy simplifies business operations and customer experiences. Hence, the future of unified commerce rests on simplicity, ease of operations, and minimalism.
Priority's solutions help you future-proof your business so that your business is ready to scale and compete in a changing world. Contact us today for a demo.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systemA unified commerce system is a holistic solution that helps businesses to manage backend processes while ensuring that customer satisfaction remains at impressive levels. Consequently, an important component of a unified commerce system is a CRM. The CRM is constantly updated with each customer interaction and changes in behavior so that the latest and the most relevant data is available to all parties concerned. Thanks to a unified customer profile, personalized shopping experiences are made easy and accessible across touchpoints. This results in enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced churn rates.
The POS experience refers to everything that happens when a customer reaches the point of sale, whether they’re paying at a physical checkout or using an online system. It’s a critical moment in the shopping journey because it’s the final step where customers complete their purchases.
Managing inventory effectively is essential for small retailers, especially for retailers managing multiple locations or running both physical stores and online shops.
In our survey of 300 U.S. retail leaders, 87% ranked it as a high or very high priority.
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