What Is Unified Commerce And Why It’s Essential To Your Retail Business

Customers Now Want Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

That's one hell of a mammoth bite to consume. Or maybe, this is just another opportunity to extend and scale your business for ultimate performance. Whichever way you look at it, one thing is sure: multichannel
and omnichannel retail platforms now fall short of meeting the expected shopper experience. In its wake, you must look to unified commerce as your new frontier for your retail business because it successfully combines the advantages of omnichannel retail
and personalization across all your retail channels. As a result, you get to offer your customers the best yet most convenient experience you can master. Consequently, you get to increase your customer engagement and repeat business. Since customer experience is now a principal differentiator for businesses, unified commerce in retail is a no-brainer.

So, What Is Unified Commerce?

Source: Paldesk

Brian Brunk defines unified commerce as a platform that goes beyond omnichannel retail by leveraging a common commerce platform, breaking down the internal channel silos walls, and putting the customer experience first.

In layman's terms, think of unified commerce as a house made of bricks. Each brick is needed for the house to be complete. Therefore, all the bricks function wholesomely. Think about all the channels you need to run your business successfully in retail.

This includes order management, inventory management, analytics, reporting, logistics, customer management, procurement, sales and marketing, and your supply chain management, among other processes. So, unified commerce integrates all these processes under one roof to form a single functioning unit.

This integration breaks down the typical data flow barriers, allowing retailers to create a better customer experience and shopping journey. All experiences and touchpoints provide one order, one customer, and one user experience. This is the ultimate level of personalization you can give your customers.

Unified Commerce Vs. Omnichannel

Omnichannel retail has been the survivor's choice
in retail for a period. The omnichannel system works because it streamlines retail channels to ensure the customer gets their product. Therefore, the physical store, website, mobile site, advertising and marketing initiatives, and social media profiles all work together to deliver products to the customer.

However, 87% of customers now expect a consistent and personalized shopping experience
on every touchpoint you offer, allowing them to start shopping anywhere and finish everywhere. For instance, a customer wants to start shopping on your social media platforms but finishes it on your website, social media pages, or physically in your brick-and-mortar store.

Your customers also want a seamless flow from online to offline shopping and vice versa, regardless of the platform you use. And as they move through these touchpoints, they expect a consistent experience of promotions, prices, etc.

The problem with omnichannel retailing is that it cannot meet the demand of these experiences because, in omnichannel, the channels work as stand-alone systems that work through integrations. In omnichannel, each touchpoint is an individual operation, where mobile apps and websites are developed separately.

Consequently, this gave birth to an unexpected decentralization of channels that cannot deliver a consistent customer experience. This is where unified commerce in retail comes in. Unlike omnichannel retail, unified commerce in retail is built from the onset with the customer in mind.

Source: Paldesk

Therefore, the unified commerce system is a unification of solutions centralized to meet the growing customer expectation for consistency and personalization. As such, your customer has a seamless shopping experience regardless of the touchpoint they use.

Here, the different sales and shopping touchpoints interoperate, interact, and get support from one platform, thus, removing any silos. Unified commerce handles everything from order fulfillment to omnichannel retailing.

You Need Unified Commerce To Grow And Scale

Apart from giving you the perfect platform to meet your customer needs, unified commerce also gives you a 360-degree view of your customer behavior and how they move with your brand. With this insight, you can create processes within the unified platform that further offer personalized customer experiences. Unified commerce gives you one single source of data that:

• Helps you manage the entire customer journey by tracking your customers from every touchpoint and accessing their complex movements from beginning to product delivery. This allows you to know your customers intimately. In turn, you can deliver a customer experience that stays true to your brand but ultimately offers every customer a unique experience.

• Helps you stay updated and trendy because the unified platform makes it easy for your organization's marketers, technology developers, and merchandisers to implement changes with agility depending on the market dynamics. As a result, you keep attracting customers and repeat customers.

• Makes it easier to integrate the system with the best professional-grade feature sets at a low cost. Future modifications to your system are also easily deployed within a unified platform compared to a channel of integrated stand-alone systems.

• Optimize modules to deliver a custom shopping experience. You can also leverage native and direct integrations that scale and allow you to grow your business with little investment. You can add future touchpoints and launch new customer experiences with machine learning.

• Allows you to assess the interactions across your shopping touchpoints and then display products that customers prefer based on factors like location and order history. This helps you move products out of your shelf faster. It also allows customers to get what they need quickly, making the shopping experience more personalized and convenient.

• Helps you provide the customer with a consistent experience, whether online or offline, by using unified commerce and its inventory visibility, product information, order management, and real-time order capabilities. Customers now shop for products and services online before they visit your physical stores.

• Gives you visibility into customer purchases and browsing histories that help you identify customer problems and create solutions that increase customer satisfaction.

• Allows you to reduce the risk of errors because the unified commerce syncs all processes within your supply chain, thus providing valid and accurate data across all touchpoints. Therefore, customers shopping offline are more unlikely to purchase goods that are out of stock, for example.

• Helps you offer an authentic omnichannel experience because you manage all your channels within a single platform. Therefore, even if your customers want everything, everywhere, and all at once, you tend to meet their needs seamlessly across your multiple channels. This, in turn, allows you to build your repeat customer portfolio.

• Reduces your vendor partnerships to one. This not only reduces the cost of sourcing different vendors but also allows you to reduce the complexity of operating your retail business, especially as you grow and add more features to your system. All you have to do is ensure you choose the right vendor.

The world is changing, and so must you

Many retailers are finding it hard to keep up with the growing demands of their customers. The 28% who are changing
to accommodate this ever-increasing need for personalization and consistency across a unified system are gaining a competitive advantage that will serve them well into the future. Think about it: contactless experiences, online shopping, and curbside pickup are already trends attracting customers in retail. Therefore, unified commerce vs. omnichannel is not a quagmire to find yourself in. The answer should always remain unified commerce. To make your work much more straightforward, get a free demo or consultatio
n and see how our Erply POS can do all the heavy lifting for you.