Unified Commerce’s 7X Impact on Revenue

Unified commerce rewards its practitioners with an impressive list of benefits. These include increased sales, real-time order and inventory visibility, improved customer loyalty, streamline operations, and a 360-degree view of customers. Together, these qualities make retailers especially resilient to unforeseen calamities. In fact, a recent study that Kibo conducted shows that retailers showing some degree of unification were seven times more likely to see an increase in ecommerce or commerce revenue during COVID-19 than their non-unified counterparts.

Conversely, those that hadn’t yet invested in unified commerce were more prone to see considerable declines in overall revenue.

To provide a useful framework for businesses as they improve their 2021 capabilities, Kibo gauged the level of unified commerce maturity of survey respondents across a variety of factors from ROI to customer experience to fulfillment.

We surveyed 400 retail executives about their experiences during the pandemic and about what the future holds for unified commerce. We surveyed executives from a broad spectrum of industries, including apparel, home goods & hardware, and sporting goods. 100% of respondents held a director-level role or above. More than a third of responses (36%) were from enterprise-level, $1B-plus corporations and 54% were from companies earning $10MM to $1B in 2020.  51% of the participants are headquartered in North America, the other 49% in EMEA.

Some key findings include:

• 51% of non-unified retailers reported an ‘unclear view of the customer’ as one of their biggest challenges in 2020
• Only 26% of respondents reported feeling highly satisfied with their current commerce technology
• Personalized site search was the most substantial driver of ROI among retailers in 2020—31% of retailers claim it drove ROI of 200% or more
• Fifty-three percent will work with current vendors to get more out of their current systems and make major investments in personalized customer experiences (50%)
• More than half of respondents listed AI-driven personalization as being critical to the CX they provided in 2020.
• More than half of respondents saw a decrease in overall commerce revenue in 2020. Meanwhile only 36% saw a drop in ecommerce revenue

The 2021 Unified Commerce Report was made to document unified commerce’s resilience against black swan and white swan events, but also to help you build unified commerce buy-in from your wider organization. We hope you can utilize both the survey data and actionable insights found within this report to inform the future of your business, delighting consumers along the way.

The 2021 Unified Commerce Report can be downloaded here. Read more about Unified Commerce here.