What Is Unified Commerce: Meaning, Benefits, and Tips

Today, customer preferences and shopping expectations are centered around convenience and personalization.

For businesses, this means going beyond omnichannel to truly offer a seamless shopping journey that will keep consumers coming back.

This is where unified commerce stands out as a retail strategy that integrates all sales channels and backend systems into a single, centralized platform. Unified commerce consolidates all of this into a unified system and creates significant advantages for brands in multiple industries. 

In the following sections, we explore what unified commerce is and dive deeper into the topic to uncover some of the most essential things you need to know as a business owner. 

What Is Unified Commerce?

Unified commerce or unified retail commerce is a business strategy that helps create a seamless shopping experience by integrating all sales channels, backend systems, and customer touchpoints.

Unified commerce aims to offer a truly personalized and consistent customer experience across multiple channels. These include brick-and-mortar stores, mobile apps, online stores, social media platforms, and others. 

In short, unified commerce is an integrated retail system that allows merchants to run their operations from a single place. It merges sales channels, inventory management, order fulfilment, and marketing all in one. 

Unified Commerce vs. Omnichannel

When defining unified commerce, questions may arise about its similarity to omnichannel. While both aim to serve customers across multiple channels, they differ fundamentally.

Here’s everything you need to know about omnichannel vs. unified commerce.

Omnichannel retailing is all about delivering a multi-channel experience to consumers, where they can start their customer journey in one place and complete it in another. For example, think of purchasing a bike online and returning it in a physical store. 

While this approach allows businesses to offer cross-channel experiences, the systems used are often disconnected rather than unified on a single platform. This disconnect can lead to challenges, wasted time, and inefficiencies.

Oftentimes, this means that customers won’t be able to accumulate rewards points across channels, receive customer support across channels, or even access purchase history.

Unified commerce, on the other hand, integrates customer data, inventory, and transactions from all your channels into one unified platform. This unified view makes it easier than ever to identify customer patterns, discover buyer needs, and more. 

How Unified Commerce Works

So how does all of this work?

A unified commerce system connects sales channels—such as online, in-app, and in-store—with backend customer data, inventory management systems, payment systems, and more.

This approach delivers real-time visibility of products, customer orders, and transaction history. It uses a unified commerce platform to centralize data across all online channels and streamline operations.

In summary, the following characteristics facilitate unified commerce:

• All sales channels are interconnected. 
• There is data consistency thanks to centralization across channels. 
• There is full visibility of inventory across channels in real-time.
• There is a unified order management system in place.
• Customer experience is unified, enabling personalization.
• There is full backend integration between systems.

With these characteristics in place, businesses can fully benefit from unified commerce.

Benefits of Unified Commerce

Unified commerce brings a lot of value to businesses of all sizes and can also provide customers with unmatched experiences and shopping journeys. 

Enhanced Customer Experience

One of the biggest advantages of adopting a unified commerce solution is that it will dramatically improve customer satisfaction, making customer interactions more personalized.

Nowadays, customers expect a seamless customer experience that’s not limited to one channel. 

With unified commerce, shoppers can switch between channels (just like in our example above where a customer can buy online and return in-store). In addition, thanks to multi-channel data collection, retailers can make tailored recommendations, allowing customers to truly see how well they know and understand their needs. 

To go a step further, with a unified commerce platform, businesses can support preferred payment methods across multiple channels, from countertop card machines to handheld solutions.

Operational Efficiency

For starters, unified commerce helps companies achieve improvements in operational efficiency and offer better customer service. By enabling real-time inventory management, such an approach creates centralized inventory visibility and reduces the chances of stockouts or overstocking. 

In addition, the fact that multiple platforms are integrated together into a single system means that complexity can be dramatically reduced and operational cysts kept to a minimum.

Moreover, both customers and companies can enjoy consistent pricing as unified commerce guarantees that all promotions and pricing modules are synchronized across all channels.

Data-Driven Insights

Another powerful benefit that this approach brings to the table is one related to the biggest asset of all – data.

Unified commerce ensures retailers have access to a unified data view, combining payment data, consumer interactions, and sales performance. 

As a result, businesses can make data-driven decisions. They can also optimize various aspects of their activities, including marketing, customer service, inventory, and more.

Increased Sales and Loyalty

When exploring the benefits of unified commerce solutions, it’s fundamental to note their effect on both offline and online sales and customer loyalty. 

Unified commerce creates better sales opportunities and boosts sales performance by allowing customers to engage with the brand at multiple touchpoints. Furthermore, unified systems ensure points and rewards from loyalty programs are seamlessly applied across all interactions.

This makes claiming these perks easier and more convenient for shoppers, enhancing their incentive to spend with your brand. 

Your Guide To Implementing a Unified Commerce Strategy

But how can you implement a unified commerce strategy for your own business?

If you don’t have much experience in the field, don’t worry. Below, we share the steps that you’ll need to take to get there.

Keep in mind that implementing unified commerce does require extensive planning and coordination in order to ensure accuracy and reliability. 

Step 1: Assess Your Current Systems

Before consolidating systems, it’s essential to understand all the multiple systems your business relies on to function. 

This includes all your payment systems, eCommerce platforms, inventory management software, marketing automation tools, and others. This will help you identify any gaps, strengths, and areas for improvement. 

Create a map of your technological ecosystem and detect silos in your current operations, like disconnected sales channels or malfunctioning inventory systems. 

Most importantly, assess whether there are any pain points in your current customer experience and backend efficiency.

Step 2: Choose the Right Unified Commerce Platform

Next, think about the unified platform that will serve your needs perfectly. Of course, what’s right for one business may not be ideal for another. It all comes down to your specific requirements.

However, some of the core features to look for include:

• Real-time inventory visibility;
• Integrated payment processing with options for payment links for easy one-time payments;
• Comprehensive customer data management;
• Compatibility with existing systems (ERP, CRM).

Carefully analyze different payment infrastructure approaches and choose one that will allow you to merge all sales channels, processes, and data together. 

For some companies, this may mean creating an in-house solution. For others, the best choice might be to rely on ready-made platforms that offer unification capabilities. 

Step 3: Integrate Sales Channels and Backend Systems

You’re now ready for the actual integration. 

Connect all customer-facing channels, including your online store, physical store, and mobile apps into the unified platform.

Ensure there’s an integration with backend systems like inventory management, payment processing, and marketing tools.

Step 4: Train Your Team

Once you’ve successfully integrated all systems, ensure that every team member is on the same page. They should be able to effectively use the unified platform’s capabilities and benefits.

This is also the stage where you’re ready to start creating use cases across channels, enabling customers to perform different activities and enjoy different perks.

Personalize and Test 

Finally, utilize data analytics to monitor how customers are interacting with your brand, what their preferences are, and what their shopping patterns look like.

This will help you offer targeted promotions, tailored product recommendations, and meaningful, customized content. Don’t forget that it’s vital to comply with all regulations that apply in the location you operate in, like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for example.

All throughout this process, you should collect feedback to refine processes and address challenges.

Unified Commerce in Action: A Few Examples

Although most consumers don’t really spend time thinking about it, unified commerce is all around us. 

Here are a few unified commerce examples worth knowing about. 

Example 1: Retail Industry

In retail, brands like ALDI utilize unified commerce to improve personalization and offer a seamless shopping experience both in-store and online. 

For example, ALDI taps into real-time inventory visibility across all stores and online platforms and just like other big brands, it allows customers to check availability, reserve items online, and pick them up in-store. 

Example 2: Hospitality Industry

In the hospitality industry, there are also plenty of examples of how unified commerce is making a difference and helping brands satisfy customer expectations.

For example, B&B hotels had an agenda of expanding their business to tap into the markets and introduce new channels as part of the guest experience.

They successfully partnered with a payment company that enabled the connection of all of their existing systems into one platform, creating a unified data collection on guests. As a result, they can learn more about each guest’s preferences and acknowledge them across all channels and locations. 

Example 3: E-Commerce 

In the world of eCommerce, a lot of brands today allow shoppers to browse online, test products in-store, and make online payments using the same account.

This is another powerful example of how unified commerce can improve not only operations but offer unmatched convenience for shoppers, no matter the channel they choose to interact with your business. 

Common Challenges of Adopting Unified Commerce 

If you’re planning on embracing unified commerce for your business, it’s important to understand that some challenges may arise throughout your journey.

As noted above, implementing unified commerce does require some planning and preparation, and it may not always be a walk in the park. 

For starters, implementing a unified commerce architecture is often complicated and sometimes, existing legacy systems won’t be able to integrate easily. 

In addition, the costs of such a project are higher when compared to most other initiatives. This makes unified commerce unaffordable for some businesses, especially during the initial stages of their development. 

Employee adoption is another popular concern. Resistance to change or lack of training can definitely slow down the adoption of this strategy, making it even more complicated. 

Tips for Successful Unified Commerce Implementation

Luckily, there are several tips that will help you get through the process quickly, easily, and most importantly – with guaranteed results. 

One of the most important things that we recommend doing is focusing on the customers’ needs. When implementing a unified commerce platform, prioritize the features that will improve customer satisfaction. In most cases, these include real-time inventory and flexible payment options. 

Think about the new payment methods that are gaining popularity and consider whether your systems have the ability to support them. 

Another important thing to consider is using data analytics to your advantage. Use unified data to learn more about customer behaviour and structure your marketing efforts. 

In addition, make sure that your mobile app aligns with other channels for a fully seamless experience. 

Conclusion

Without a doubt, unified commerce is the future of retail and service industries. 

By taking advantage of this approach, businesses can successfully deliver consistent customer experiences, improve efficiency, and stand out from the crowd. 

We hope that this article will help you take the steps towards a unified commerce platform that will allow your brand to grow, unlocking its full potential. 

FAQ

What do cash and cash equivalents mean?

Cash and cash equivalents are cash, petty cash, bank accounts, and investments that are short-term and highly liquid. For instance, these could be Treasury bills, short-term government bonds, and others.

How is free cash flow calculated?

Free cash flow represents how much cash the business has after it has covered all its expenses and obligations. You can calculate free cash flow by adding your net income and non-cash expenses and subtracting the change in working capital and capital expenditure.

Is cash flow the same as profit?

No, cash flow is not the same as profit. Cash flow represents the movement of money in and out of a business, while profit shows the financial gain (revenue minus expenses) on your income statement.