What Is Unified Commerce—And Why Is It Essential in 2024 and Beyond?

More than ever consumers expect shopper experiences that are seamless across all channels. And in 2024, consumers expect those channels to service them anywhere and anytime. To meet the moment, companies are moving away from all-in-one suite solutions or monolithic platforms in favor of composable architecture. Retailers need the extensibility and scalability of these solutions to achieve unified commerce in 2024 and beyond.

What Is Unified Commerce? What Does It Mean?

Because omnichannel retail environments were composed of stand-alone systems, omnichannel commerce became a tangled web of uncoupled channels and ramrodded integrations. This made it difficult to deliver a consistent customer experience (CX). Or to gain a cohesive understanding—or view—of a customer — that’s where unified retail commerce comes in.

Inversely, unified commerce is built from the ground up with the customer in mind. With unified retail commerce, businesses can deliver superior customer experiences through a centralized platform made up of unified commerce solutions.

Therefore, unified commerce isn’t simply an evolution of omnichannel retail, it’s panacea.

In unified commerce, your sales channels are supported by a unified commerce platform built with composable architecture that serves as an end-to-end growth driver. On their end, consumers experience seamless shopping even as they move from touchpoint to touchpoint. Retailers and brands can deliver a customer-first strategy through unified commerce.

Unified Commerce Vs Omnichannel – Evolving Toward a Single Source of Transactional Truth

A quarter-century ago, the first step on the eCommerce journey was adding an online presence to complement retail stores. Email and search marketing followed. But it wasn’t until mobile shopping and social media surged that retailers realized a more broad-based strategy was needed.

The concept of omnichannel shopping was born, with each digital touchpoint serving as its own independent operation. Mobile apps and websites developed separately from flagship ecommerce sites. Web orders were fulfilled from purpose-built distribution hubs. IRL stores competed with ecommerce stores for revenue.

The shortcomings of this strategy were already evident before 2020. As they sought to compete with Amazon, retailers needed to better serve customers regardless of where their shopping journey began or ended. But, as discussed earlier, this led to a decentralized mess of disparate technologies and why the emergence of unified retail commerce was inevitable.

In unified commerce, touchpoints interact and interoperate with each other rather than in isolated silos. Various sales channels are supported by a single platform that serves as an end-to-end solution for all functions.

This unified commerce platform is built on a single technology stack that handles everything from omnichannel marketing to order fulfillment. On their end, consumers experience seamless shopping even as they move from touchpoint to touchpoint. Meanwhile, merchants gain a 360-degree view of how customers interact with the brand.

By embracing unified commerce, “retailers gain a single and connected view of the customer,” explains Meyar Sheik, President and Chief Commerce Officer at Kibo, to Digital Commerce 360. This allows brands to deliver more relevant personalization throughout an entire customer journey.

Shoppers Want Seamless Customer Experiences – And So Far, Retailers Aren’t Delivering

A unified commerce vision may seem like a lofty goal, but it’s increasingly what customers expect.

87% of shoppers want a personalized and consistent experience across touchpoints. That is, they want to be able to start shopping using one touchpoint and finalize the purchase in still another. This could involve them moving from online to offline—and back again. Shoppers expect standardized pricing and promotions even as they move across touchpoints. In fact, 77% say they’re more likely to buy from brands that demonstrate consistency.

Demand for these experiences has only grown in the 2021 era of skyrocketing online orders, curbside pickup, and contactless experiences. McKinsey reported that store curbside pickup has doubled since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, pickup inside the store at a service desk or locker has grown by 50%.

So far, however, retailers aren’t keeping up. Recent studies show that only 28% of retailers offered the ability to “start the sale anywhere, finish the sale anywhere” via persistent shopping carts and other features. And while the vast majority of merchants had already implemented systems pre-pandemic to support consistent pricing and promotions, only 43% optimized operations to ensure the system works well.

COVID-19 has forced retailers to make great strides. But they had to scramble to muster resources and budgets. Without the proper investment in a unified commerce platform, they’ll similarly be unable to respond to new challenges.

What Is a Unified Commerce Platform?

A unified commerce platform is a centralized platform that unites backend commerce solutions to form a fully unified  retail commerce data model that leads to a single source of transactional truth. The best unified commerce platform will help break down technological barriers, keep customer data flowing in real-time, and unify the shopping journey for better CX.

As we say at Kibo, with a unified commerce platform: there is one order, one customer, one user experience across all touchpoints and experiences.

But to fully harness the power of unified commerce, companies need a platform that’s built for the moment. They need a fully-featured unified ecommerce solution that enables end-to-end visibility and control. They need unified ecommerce technology that unifies functions such as online sales, order management, and personalization, so they can:

• Manage the entire customer journey and access real-time customer insights from a single source of truth. Merchants can track shoppers across touchpoints and understand complex paths to purchase. Disparate systems are currently a major hurdle to unified commerce, with 48% of retailers saying they struggle to track customers across their organizations.

• Deliver a true-to-brand customer experience without the burden of maintaining the technology infrastructure. Costs for web hosting, testing, and new feature development can be defrayed by using a unified cloud platform.

• Two-thirds of merchants in a Kibo study said IT resource constraints posed an obstacle to implementing unified commerce. A comprehensive platform alleviates this problem. With the entire customer journey visible via a single administrative console, marketers and merchandisers can enact changes quickly in response to market conditions.

Unified Ecommerce Infrastructure Designed for Company Growth

The benefits of an end-to-end unified commerce platform go beyond day-to-day operations. A modern platform built with a single code base arms merchants with increased agility. Future modifications and new features can rapidly be deployed on a unified commerce platform, whereas with a daisy-chain array of stand-alone systems, updates can be slow and costly.

Other technical advantages allow merchants to:

• Tap rich capabilities and common third-party integrations. With a unified commerce platform, merchants gain access to professional-grade feature sets and can select from a robust menu of partner integrations quickly and at low cost.

• Develop rich customizations and leverage direct, native integrations. With less investment required for development, merchants can customize online shopping environments by opting into modules that automatically inter-operate.

• Maximize technology investments with a modern, microservices-based platform built to scale. A unified platform built with agility in mind effectively future-proofs businesses. They can quickly add offerings and use headless architecture to develop presentation layers as new touchpoints are introduced.
• Unified commerce platforms, like the Kibo Unified Commerce Platform, utilize machine learning at their core, allowing you to personalize and optimize existing touchpoints. Or to launch new and exciting customer experiences altogether.

The Advantages of Delivering Unified Customer Experiences

Now more than ever, providing a superior customer experience translates into increased sales and loyalty.

Unified commerce improves CX by meeting core expectations for relevance, accuracy, and customer service.

• With end-to-end personalization, merchants can provide contextual experiences that factor in interactions across ecommerce sites as well as in stores. Dynamically displaying the most relevant products and content based on location, past order history, and AI-driven personalization can help shoppers connect with the right products faster.

• Real-time order and inventory visibility is crucial for shoppers as they navigate shopping options and order fulfillment, so they can plan store visits better. Retailers relying on a patchwork of disparate order management, product information, and online systems can struggle with inconsistencies and delays, leading to customer dissatisfaction.

• Reliance on customer service is at an all-time high. More than ever, shoppers expect retailers to resolve increasingly complex requests for assistance. The Harvard Business Review found that in the first two weeks of the pandemic alone, the percentage of inquiries rated “difficult” doubled to 1 in 5. Customer service agents and store associates need  organization-wide visibility into browsing and purchase histories to bring interactions to a satisfying resolution.

Preparing for 2023 With a Unified Commerce Strategy

As retailers continue to combat the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and continuing supply chain issues, consumer expectations are still growing ever higher. The right unified commerce strategy and solution can deliver the robust functionality merchants need to fulfill those expectations while also providing nimble adaption to whatever the future holds.

Our 2021 Unified Commerce Report includes a templated conversation on how to best approach the unified commerce conversation at your company and a 6-step plan for building a future-proof unified commerce strategy.

In addition, check out this IDC Spotlight Report, “Unified Commerce: An Innovative Alternative for Omni-Channel and Digital Commerce.”

Download this complimentary report (Sponsored by Kibo), to learn more about unified commerce and the various benefits of a unified omnichannel platform, including customer satisfaction, increased sales and traffic, and quick implementation and integration for a higher ROI.