What is Unified Commerce?

By Karly Cyr, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Commerce Cloud

Disconnected systems are more than just an inconvenience for businesses — they’re a liability. Clunky customer experiences lead to lost sales, loyalty, and trust. Think: Inaccurate promises for delivery and pickup windows. The inability to provide easy, simple returns and exchanges (like buy online, return in-store). The solution? Unified commerce.

Unified commerce is what makes consistent, cohesive shopping experiences possible. It connects digital commerce, point of sale (POS), and order management on one platform. Truly unified commerce is both a business strategy and a technology stack. Here’s everything you need to know about this approach.

• What is unified commerce?
• Unified commerce vs. omnichannel
• The benefits of unified commerce for retailers
• Unified commerce brings online and in-store shopping together
• Unified commerce implementation: challenges and solutions
• The future of unified commerce: emerging trends
• How to choose an effective unified commerce platform
• What unified commerce means for your business

Unified commerce gives you an accurate, updated, 360-degree view of what’s happening across all aspects of commerce. You get a holistic view of customers, orders, and inventory — all in one place, without switching between multiple tools. Unified commerce is a business strategy and technology approach that brings together digital commerce, point of sale, and order management systems into a single platform. Instead of dealing with a patchwork of systems that don’t communicate well and can only reconcile information after the fact, unified commerce brings it all under one roof, in real-time. When it comes to making informed business decisions and providing stellar customer experiences, unified commerce is a gamechanger. It’s no wonder, then, that investing in a unified commerce strategy is the top priority for retail CIOs.

At the highest level, you can think of unified commerce as a business approach that brings three different pillars of commerce under one platform.

• Digital commerce: Your online storefront is the visual representation of your brand, and it’s likely the beating heart of your digital revenue. By unifying your digital commerce platform with other business critical aspects (like order management and point of sale), you can eliminate friction, improve accuracy, and operate with more agility.
• Order management: When order and inventory management are connected to the rest of your commerce operations, you always know what’s available, what’s in demand, sales progress, order trends, and more. This helps you identify
• Point of sale: Your in-store operations should work in tandem with your order management and digital commerce systems. When your point of sale system is unified with the rest of your business, you can give store associates access to valuable information. For example, a POS integrated with OMS means that employees have access to real-time inventory across all store locations. Out of a certain SKU? An associate can give the customer granular inventory data and tell them where they can find a specific item in stock nearby. This makes it easier to close the deal, up-sell, and cross-sell.

A unified commerce platform synchronises 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. The main goal of omnichannel is to gain the ability to meet your customers wherever they want to engage, browse, or shop.

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: Imagine if a shopper could start a purchase on your app, get help in-store, and receive support after delivery—without repeating themselves once. Unified commerce lays the foundation for a cohesive buying experience across shopping channels. It makes it easy to ensure that pricing, inventory availability, promotions, and critical messaging are consistent no matter where customers engage.
• Personalised shopping: By centralising customer data, retailers can make targeted product recommendations, display browsing histories, address customers by name, and customise promotions. This is crucial when you consider that 46% of customers will purchase more during a personalised shopping experience.
• Simplified process: How much time could your staff save if they didn’t have to switch between multiple systems to serve a customer or complete a sale? What would your operations look like if all channels shared real-time data, with zero manual reconciliation? With unified commerce, critical business systems work together seamlessly and data can be shared across different teams. This helps teams communicate faster, resolve cases more quickly, and minimise any bottlenecks.
• Better customer support: Unified commerce allows sales and customer service teams (whether they are operating digitally or in-store) to access complete product and customer information. With up-to-date profiles, teams can quickly see order histories, customer data, order fulfilment 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, orders, and inventory.
• Easy integration with other systems: What could your team focus on if they didn’t have to spend so much time stitching systems together behind the scenes? Truly unified commerce means that your development and IT teams will have more time and resources to differentiate your business through innovation and strategic optimisations.

If you have brick-and-mortar stores along with digital sales channels, it can be difficult to make these shopping experiences feel cohesive. In fact, many companies are forced to treat online and physical channels as separate parts of the business. With unified commerce, it’s much easier to reconcile online and in-store operations, data, inventory, and sales. This approach bridges the gap between online and in-store experiences, allowing customers to interact seamlessly with your brand across multiple touchpoints.

From an operational perspective, unified commerce creates efficiency by connecting data and providing a single source of truth. Inventory levels, customer profiles, and transaction histories are updated across all channels instantly, giving businesses better visibility and control. This means:

• Store associates have full visibility into inventory and helpful details about in-store customers, like their shopping preferences, recent transactions, and order history.
• Merchandisers get a more holistic view of what’s selling, where, and through which channels. This enables more strategic product placements and assortment planning.
• Marketers with access to unified data, like integrated behavioural and transactional details, can create more targeted, effective campaigns and promotions.

Ultimately, unified commerce not only enhances the customer experience but also drives operational efficiency and profitability for your business.

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

Technology integration
Implementing unified commerce will involve careful planning, custom integrations, and often significant restructuring of other back-end systems. Working with a commerce platform partner whose systems are easy to integrate through APIs will make the process significantly smoother. Bonus points if your partner has connectors and pre-built integrations for things like order management, point of sale, and digital commerce. This makes it faster and easier to get up and running.

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 with the headless commerce solutions of your choice 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.

Organisational change management
Implementing unified commerce often requires new workflows, cross-functional collaboration, and changes in team roles and responsibilities. Resistance to change or lack of training can slow adoption and reduce the system’s effectiveness. To ensure a smooth transition to unified commerce, it’s important to plan to understand how each team will be impacted and anticipate resistance. Developing a detailed change management plan will help you minimise risk, boost productivity, and get valued employees on board.

Generative AI tools and other innovative ecommerce capabilities unlock automation, optimisation, and scalability with ease and speed never before possible. These innovations are reshaping the entire shopping experience, from acquisition to conversion and loyalty.

But your AI tools and capabilities are only as good as the platform you build and implement them on. Success in the future of commerce will come down to a complete, unified ecommerce platform that enables agility and innovation — without skyrocketing your total cost of ownership.

AI has the potential to transform both retail operations and the customer experience. Operationally, retailers that integrate AI with their unified commerce platform are implementing dynamic pricing, relying on predictive models to help manage inventory and lower carrying costs, and using generative AI to create sales and marketing copy that reflects real-time customer preferences. It’s also transforming the customer experience with data-driven product recommendations, targeted sales and discounts, and AI-powered chatbots that can do everything from answer product questions to facilitate quick returns. When emerging technologies integrate with unified commerce platforms and are informed by real-time data, they can significantly impact revenue, the customer experience, and operational efficiency.

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. It's important to consider your business's unique needs and objectives when choosing a platform.

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

• Essential features: Determine what essential unified commerce features you need. These may include in-store inventory planning, the ability to build direct-to-consumer or direct-to-business websites, integrations with third-party retailers, and enhanced payment support to streamline global payment management and simplify tax compliance.
• Integration capabilities: Can the platform cover the key systems that your business needs on the back end? If your business relies on specialised systems due to industry, for example, the platform must have the ability to integrate with that solution. Also consider how flexible the unified commerce platform is at supporting the headless solutions that power the front end of your business.
• 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: Reaching today's buyers means being active in many digital channels. Can the system that you're considering ingest information in real time from social channels with selling capabilities? Can it power what's needed to meet your in-app promotional goals? It's also helpful to consider that social and digital channels are always changing, and it pays off to choose a platform that keeps up with emerging channels.