What Is Unified Commerce?

Customers want their shopping experiences to feel convenient, intuitive, and consistent — no matter where they engage with your brand. They expect all of your channels to work together in a way that feels cohesive. For example, a customer should be able to make a purchase online, then pick their items up at a nearby store. If an item is in-stock on your website, the same product should be available on your app. Unified commerce is what makes these types of shopping experiences possible. With unified commerce, you can integrate your sales, service, and marketing channels into a single platform along with all of your integral backend business systems, like order management, payments, CRM systems, and more.

For customers, unified commerce means an accurate and predictable brand experience across all digital and physical interactions. For businesses, unified commerce means greater visibility into key operational information — such as inventory, sales data, service interactions, marketing metrics, and more. It also makes it easier to access real-time information so you can make swifter, smarter business decisions.

Truly unified commerce is both a business strategy and a technology stack. Here's everything you need to know about this approach.

• Unified commerce defined
• Unified commerce vs. omnichannel
• The benefits of unified commerce
• Unified commerce brings online and in-store shopping together
• Unified commerce implementation: challenges and solutions
• Creating a seamless shopping experience
• The future of unified commerce: emerging trends
• How to choose an effective unified commerce platform
• What unified commerce means for you

Unified commerce is a business strategy and technology approach that brings together your sales channels, customer data, and backend systems into one platform. Instead of dealing with a patchwork of systems that don't communicate well or only reconcile information after the fact, unified commerce gives you an accurate, real-time, 360-degree view of what's happening across your entire business. This is crucial when it comes to making informed business decisions and providing stellar customer experiences. It's no wonder, then, that investing in a unified commerce strategy is a top priority for CIOs.

At the highest level, you can think of unified commerce as a business approach. Real-time data from around your business forms the big picture: You know what's available, what's in demand, sales progress, order trends, and more. This helps you identify opportunities for growth, optimize operations, and get ahead of any potential issues.

A unified commerce platform synchronizes inventory, product information, sales data, customer preferences, pricing, and other essential details about your business. Rather than trying to identify insights between multiple siloed datasets, a unified approach makes it easier to take action on your data.

Omnichannel commerce is an approach that adds new shopping channels (in store and via websites, apps, social selling, and livestream platforms) as they become popular. Even if those channels are linked, the front end often isn't tightly integrated with the back end. And one system might not share consistent data about the same shopper. It can be a piecemeal effort with customer experience and awareness limitations.

On the other hand, unified commerce is built as one from the ground up (or is so tightly integrated that it might as well be). It creates a single view of the customer and business operations, joining all channels and backend systems at its foundation.

There are many benefits of unified commerce for business users as well as customers. Some of the most important include:

• Consistent buying experiences: Unified commerce lays the foundation for a consistent buying experience across shopping channels. For instance, users can start a purchase in an app and continue it on their laptop later.
• Personalized shopping: By centralizing customer data, businesses can make targeted product recommendations, display browsing histories, address customers by name, and customize promotions.This is crucial when you consider that 46% of customers will purchase more during a personalized shopping experience.
• Simplified process: When all your systems work together seamlessly and data can be shared across different teams, this improves operational efficiency. It helps teams communicate faster, resolve cases more quickly, and gain visibility of any necessary information.
• Better customer support: Unified commerce allows sales and customer service to access complete customer information. With up-to-date profiles, both teams can quickly see order histories, customer data, order fulfillment status, and inventory availability to close sales or answer questions about recent transactions.
• Unified view of data: A unified commerce platform pulls together different data streams and gives you a single dashboard so you can easily oversee what's happening in your business. This creates a single source of truth for customer data and critical business elements, such as sales and inventory.
• Easy integration with other systems: While a unified commerce platform brings together backend systems (such as inventory management and payments), it also has the flexibility to integrate with headless commerce solutions. Headless commerce solutions are often used to manage front-end systems, such as a website or shopping app. With a unified backend that can work across different channel applications, both operational data and the customer experience are powered with the latest information.

If you have brick-and-mortar stores along with digital sales channels, it can be difficult to make these shopping experiences feel cohesive. With unified commerce, this becomes much easier. To bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping, a unified point-of-sale (POS) system is crucial. This connects all your sales channels, including online, in-store, and mobile, into one centralized platform. The result? Seamless management of inventory, orders, customer data, and promotions across all touchpoints — and a consistent shopping experience for customers regardless of where they buy.

Investing in unified commerce is a great way to centralize your operations, but getting it up and running can be complex. Common challenges include:

Technology integration

Many businesses are working with legacy systems, highly specialized backend platforms, and a variety of commerce solutions from different vendors. Finding ways to get all these disparate systems to communicate can be challenging and expensive. A unified commerce platform can replace a variety of back-end systems while integrating with headless commerce solutions that power your digital sales front end.

Data migration

Combining data from multiple sales channels and back-end systems can be difficult. With the right unified ecommerce platform, data can be migrated to that platform to run the back-end elements of your business. A single source of transactional truth and customer data means it's easier to use data when making key business decisions.

Customer experience consistency

Introducing diverse sales channels adds layers of operational complexity to delivering a consistent experience across touchpoints. There's an increased risk for inconsistent pricing, inaccurate product availability, or user interfaces that don't meet expectations during a sale. Investing in a unified commerce platform that integrates real-time data from back-end systems helps deliver a solid brand experience across channels.

Cost and resource allocation

Introducing a unified commerce strategy requires a financial investment in new technologies as well as training staff and alignment of business processes. Choosing the right vendor can help eliminate these risks by streamlining technology costs and managing the associated costs with best practices. Training and process-focused resources can help close gaps and prepare your team to use unified commerce technologies at each point in the customer journey.

Operational efficiency

Operational workload increases with unified commerce due to managing multiple sales channels, inventory systems, and logistics processes. This complexity can strain resources and lead to inefficiencies. A centralized platform that incorporates AI and advanced analytics can predict demand, manage dynamic pricing and product availability, automate replenishment, and eliminate friction from the order fulfillment process.

Customers want seamless, personalized shopping experiences no matter where they engage with your brand. With a unified commerce platform, you have the data and infrastructure to make that happen. Pulling customer data (e.g., past purchases, preferred channels, browsing history, payment methods, and customer service interactions) into a single profile can improve the customer experience with:

• Personalized shopping experiences and tailored product recommendations
• Targeted marketing that speaks to each customer's interests
• Loyalty points or rewards programs that deepen brand affiliation
• Tailored promotions based on interest, geography, or other customer data
• Simplified interactions that feel intuitive across every channel

When it comes to the future of commerce, a unified platform coupled with AI-powered capabilities like conversational commerce, dynamic pricing, and other innovative ecommerce functionalities will be key to success.

In fact, implementing AI and improving data use and management will be top priorities for commerce leaders over the next two years. Unified commerce platforms have the potential to transform both business operations and the customer experience. Operationally, businesses that integrate AI with their unified commerce platform can implement dynamic pricing, predictive models to help manage inventory and lower carrying costs, generative AI to create sales and marketing campaigns that reflect real-time customer preferences. Unified platforms also improve the customer experience with data-driven product recommendations, targeted sales and discounts, and AI-powered shopping assistants that can do everything from answer product questions to facilitate quick returns.

Once you've adopted a unified commerce business strategy and mindset, it's time to choose a platform that will make that vision a reality. When choosing a platform, it's important to consider the unique objectives of your business.

Asking the right questions can help you find a solution that meets your technology needs today and helps you scale as your business grows in the future. Factors to consider include:

• Essential features: Determine which features are essential and which are nice to have. Critical features may include in-store inventory planning, the ability to build direct-to-consumer or business-to-business websites, omni-channel order management, and enhanced payment support to enable global payment management and simplify tax compliance across geographies.
• Out-of-the-box capabilities: Can the platform cover the key systems your business needs on the back end? If not, you’ll need to rely on other vendors to get the job done — which can cause the total cost to skyrocket and significantly increase your time to market.
• Scalability: Does the vendor offer a solution that's efficient and cost-effective at your current level? And how effectively will they scale as you grow or diversify your business.
• Omnichannel strategies: To garner awareness and increase revenue, your business needs a sales, service, and marketing presence on many different channels. That means it’s critical for your ecommerce platform to ingest information in real time from all your sales channels — and make it easy for you to take action on all the data. It's also helpful to consider that social commerce and other digital channels are always changing, and it pays to choose an innovative platform that keeps up with emerging trends.