Most businesses can’t just rely on focusing only on in-person or online payments. As per a study, nearly three-fourths of customers prefer to use multiple channels while purchasing, triggering retailers to build new commerce experiences. There are multiple channels through which transactions occur, from web to email to SMS. The transactions have become more dynamic and less one-dimensional than they used to be. E.g., you can receive a payment link for your recent job through SMS.
As many businesses are not transitioning to unified commerce, you can lose as much as 10 to 30% of the sales if you don’t employ unified commerce. Also, with the evolving technologies, customers demand seamless, personalized, and situationally relevant experiences while making payments.
In today’s world, customers interact with businesses through different channels. They may learn about your offerings through social media channels, browse products through mobile apps, purchase through the website, pick up or return through physical store points, and interact with customer service through calls. Customers want to engage in each of these activities through the channel that best meets their needs, and they expect companies to be aware of the actions they’ve already taken. Unified commerce enables customers to switch channels while providing businesses with a comprehensive view of all activities.
We have written this article for businesses of all sizes, covering all aspects of unified commerce. Whether you are a retailer, an e-commerce business, or a marketplace powering other businesses, this article will help you learn why it is necessary to move away from a siloed e-commerce approach and focus on a unified commerce strategy.
Unified Commerce:
It is a business strategy in which all the channels of sales, data, and backend systems are integrated into a single and seamless platform. It focuses on delivering customers a fully integrated and personalized buying experience on all platforms, including physical stores, websites, mobile apps, social media, and others.
This huge integration will give retailers a holistic view of customer behavior and preferences. They will utilize that information to create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns and sales strategies. An integrated picture of the back end, including inventory, order fulfillment, and sales performance, enables merchants to optimize operations.
Implementing unified commerce is more than just tweaking your payment approach; it requires a complete rethinking of how your most crucial architecture, processes, and operations work together.
Benefits of Unified E-commerce:
Unified e-commerce aims to create a more connected, customer-centric, and efficient retail experience that can meet today’s customers’ expectations. Here are the major advantages of choosing unified commerce:
1. Better Customer Experience:
With Unified Commerce, businesses can remove all the roadblocks of customer journeys and create tailored buying experiences on every channel for customers. By removing these roadblocks, it will become easier and faster for customers to make purchases. It will ultimately result in higher conversion rates, sales, and customer LTV and boost brand loyalty.
2. Better Business Insights:
Real-time visibility into inventory levels, sales data, and customer activity across all channels outperforms more fragmented traditional commerce approaches. All essential data points are presented in context, allowing businesses to make more educated decisions about inventory management, marketing, and sales tactics, potentially leading to higher sales and profitability.
3. Improved Operational Efficiency:
With the consolidation of views and data, there will be fewer redundancies and inefficiencies in business operations. It will also result in fewer errors and delays, which will help save time and money. For instance, without a unified commerce strategy, businesses have to put separate efforts into inventory, pricing, and promotions. It will lead to more efforts, errors, and discrepancies. However, with a unified approach, all these systems will be centralized, with updates automatically reflected across all channels.
Externally, online businesses can provide better, faster service by centralizing online and in-person sales, refunds, transaction history, order management, inventory, and fulfillment.
Omnichannel Vs. Unified Commerce:
The traditional omnichannel is becoming obsolete with the rising customer expectations and newer technologies. Unified commerce is the modern answer for this traditional omnichannel strategy, and the differences make it more advantageous. Although both strategies focus on serving customers through multiple channels, the approaches differ. Whereas an omnichannel approach is primarily designed to drive short-term conversion by providing consistent experiences across siloed channels, unified commerce aims to increase customer lifetime value (LTV) by consolidating systems and data into a single platform, resulting in a continuous and integrated experience as customers transact and engage across multiple channels.
Here are the detailed differences:
- Unified commerce is a more holistic approach that integrates all sales channels, processes, and data. It means the customers can make orders, track order history, and get customer support across all channels using a single account with a streamlined experience.
- The omnichannel experience focuses on providing customers with multiple channels to make purchases and interact with your brand, but these channels wouldn’t be fully integrated. The omnichannel strategy depends on multiple technology platforms that are integrated to a certain level. For e.g., a brand can have both an online store and a physical store, but customers are not able to do things like:
- Access Order history or Customer support across any channel with a single account: For example, a customer’s in-app and online purchase history may only be accessible through those channels, whereas their in-store transaction history will not be accessible online or in-app.
- Engagement on multiple channels throughout the buying journey: For example, a consumer may be unable to return an online purchase in-store or request that an out-of-stock item be shipped to their home address.
- The customer data handling approach differs from the unified and omnichannel commerce approach: In unified commerce, data from all channels is centralized, which creates a more comprehensive view of all the data, such as customer preferences, sales trends, and real-time inventory visibility, all stored in a single database. In the omnichannel approach, multiple platforms and systems are used, and they are not integrated into each other, which is why the data is stored in separate databases. This not only necessitates a significant increase in reconciliation, which consumes time and resources, but it can also make tracking and analyzing consumer behavior and sales success across all channels more challenging.
Who should implement a unified commerce strategy?
Whatever your target audience or market is or which sales channels are generating maximum value for your business, unified commerce can improve your customer experience and streamline your operations. It will increase your revenue and lower your operating costs.
The businesses that should utilize unified commerce are typically looking for:
- Improve agility and responsiveness to changing client expectations
- Revamp inefficient or obsolete operational architecture to take a future-proof and simple strategy to shape their firm.
- Clarify sales and customer data with personalized and comprehensive reporting.
- Save money and time with developer and engineering resources
- Achieve or increase competitive distinctiveness
How to Implement Unified Commerce?
You have to put meticulous planning and coordination across different departments to implement a unified commerce strategy. The exact method to implement unified commerce will depend on whether you build solutions in-house or work with a third-party provider like Ceymox Technologies. Here are the major ways that a business can take to implement a unified commerce approach:
1. Conduct an Assessment:
Firstly, you must comprehensively assess your current sales channels, systems, and processes. This will help you identify areas that require integration, update, or replacement.
2. Choose a payments infrastructure approach:
Companies will require both infrastructure and strategy by which they can integrate all sales channels, processes, and data into a single system. For this, you can hire an IT development company like Ceymox Technologies that can implement online and in-person payments using a single processor and a single set of APIs.
3. Integrate Systems:
After selecting the platform, businesses are required to integrate their existing payment interface with the new platform. It will involve integrating POS systems, inventory management systems, loyalty, and CRM systems.
4. Implement cross-channel capabilities:
After systems integration, businesses can build use cases across all channels, allowing customers to do things like buy online and pick up or return in-store. To support these new capabilities, processes will need to be updated, and workers will need to be trained.
5. Personalize the shopping experience:
Businesses can employ data analytics to track customer behavior and preferences across all channels, allowing them to personalize the buying experience. This involves providing targeted advertising, product recommendations, and bespoke content. It’s worth emphasizing that data-driven personalizations should be carried out in line with local legislation, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
6. Monitor and Adapt:
After the implementation of a unified approach, businesses are required to monitor and adapt as per requirement. It involves making changes in the processes, updating technology, or responding to changes as per customer behavior and preferences.
Wrapping Up:
In this article, we have understood all the major aspects of unified commerce. With rising customer demands and expectations, it is essential that businesses focus on a unified approach and align their existing systems with unified commerce. At Ceymox Technologies, the best e-commerce development company in India, we have expertise in developing e-commerce stores from scratch, aligning existing stores to unified commerce, integrating payment gateways, building advanced features and functionalities, and a lot more. Let us know your requirements.
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