Understanding ETP Unified Commerce solutions better

Today’s consumers, more than ever, demand access to the best products, the latest technologies, the coolest brands, and most of all to an amazing shopping experience that is seamless across all sales channels. However, even today, several retailers are sluggish in embracing a unified commerce strategy as a result of which their customers don’t always have access to a desirable, continuous experience while browsing, selecting, shopping, making payments for, and reviewing products of their choice as well as while returning them across retail channels.

Omni-channel Retail Strategy, popularized during recent years was supposed to address this and offer the savvy customers a consistent, superior shopping experience across every website, marketplace mobile app, and in-store sales channel. But while omni-channel made an excellent attempt at integrating a patchwork of disconnected business systems and applications, it hasn’t quite solved the complications that arise out of disconnected systems working in silos, which hinders the ability to deliver a complete, cohesive and curated customer experience.

Unified Commerce Strategy is seen as the next step in modern retail technology as it helps a retail business deliver a reliable, comprehensive experience no matter how or where its customers are shopping from.

What is Unified Commerce?

The retail industry has witnessed an evolution from separate offline stores and purely online sales through websites to distributed ecosystems comprising of numerous sales channels. In order to be successful, retailers today need to merge all their retail touchpoints, deliver personalization across all sales channels, and provide an omni-channel customer experience. To achieve this, they implement various software solutions such as a Point-of-Sale (POS), a Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Unified inventory management and order fulfilment systems amongst others, coupled with technologies such as e-commerce, data analysis, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning (ML). But getting all these different apps, solutions and systems to interact uninterruptedly with each other is a demanding task.

Unified commerce drives the omni-channel retail experience to the next level by replacing all the disconnected IT systems with a single, centralized platform, which combines the POS, CRM, e-commerce, m-commerce (mobile commerce), order fulfillment, Unified inventory management, and other technologies.

Disconnected systems operate in silos without inherently communicating with each other. As a result, the data collected by them has limited usage and is often redundant. Consequentially, companies tend to make decisions based on incomplete data, which hinders their ability to provide their consumers the desired shopper experience. By integrating everything onto a centralized unified commerce platform, such companies can eliminate this holdup and ensure that the right systems are inter-connected and sharing data for an optimized outcome.

The Difference between Omni-channel and Unified Commerce

One of the core tenets of an omni-channel retail strategy is that it’s built to deliver an experience that unifies the diverse phygital (digital and physical) commerce into a single, cohesive shopping experience. However, this does not include ensuring that all the other systems such as order management system, order fulfilment, NFC payment devices, etc. are interfacing well with the omni-channel retail solutions and communicating freely with each other. As such, omni-channel strategy often involves complex integrations and manual processes that can create data silos, thwart efficiency, and eventually increase costs.

Unified Commerce strategy mandates that both the data and the different constituent systems are unified so that there is only one version of the truth (data) and the exact same experience across channels (unified systems) that the customers and employees can get. Retail enterprises today should hence envision unified commerce as a primary business strategy as essentially, it is about offering customers a truly consistent experience across all retail channels.

Benefits of a Unified Commerce Solution

Concentrating on customer-centricity is the mantra (motto) of the modern-day retail world, wherein your customer’s needs and desires are a concern above all others. The magnificence of the unified commerce approach is that it provides the right tools for making your business customer-centric.

A unified commerce platform offers the following 4 benefits by means of which retail customers will get a seamless shopping experience:

Flexibility: Buyers can start, continue and finish purchases using various devices and sales channels, without barriers or interruptions. Their buying journey is more flexible than ever.
Interaction tracking: Fully integrated systems make it possible to monitor every engagement your customers are having with your brand, and to analyze these for future decision-making.
Real-time updates: Fully integrated channels make it possible to instantly update product information at all levels of the system, so your buyers always get relevant data.
Personalized recommendations: Monitoring the customer interactions allows you to create tailored offerings for each one of them.

For the retailers, the benefits of implementing a unified commerce platform are:

Reduce time and costs on integrations: A centralized digital platform enables retailers to automate most of the time-consuming manual processes, which results in reducing the costs of integrating multiple functions and improving the employee productivity.
Reduce errors: Automation and business transparency ensure data is more accurate than ever and significantly reduce the number of errors associated with manual management of separate solutions. Moreover, predictive analytics based on AI and ML algorithms help you anticipate and prevent issues, resulting in reducing costs further.
Get a single version of the truth: With a unified commerce solution, you’ll have a single source of truth for all your customer data. For example, you’ll be able to obtain a real-time view of all interactions between your customers and your digital commerce channels. This will give you a better idea of who is buying, from where—and why that matters. A unified commerce solution also makes it possible to tie together purchases with previous promotions, enabling retailers to track and analyze the performance KPIs of the marketing promotions, which can be hugely valuable in determining which promotions to repeat, revise or remove the next year/season.

Efficient management: Since the unified commerce platform lifts barriers at all business levels ensuring the transparency of processes, it facilitates the most efficient management possible. Retail staff are aware of any changes in real time, so they can make the right decisions concerning inventory, delivery, marketing and other business processes without delays. Retailers can get rid of such common retail problems as overstocking and understocking.
Get real-time, accurate information for decision making: When a single unified platform is implemented across the retail business, the top management gets complete control of the processes, from sales to purchasing, to allocation, to pricing and to warehouse management. This real-time visibility gives the management the ability to act quickly if needed. For example, if a company were to experience a sudden boost in sales at a particular location, with the real-time visibility of the sheer number of orders booked, inventory at the store and the stock availability at the nearest warehouse or RDC as enabled by the unified commerce solution, the management will be in a very good position to respond quickly to arrange emergency deliveries and timely store replenishments from the warehouse in order to fulfil the pending and new orders.
Offer a true omni-channel experience: Flexibility in searching and buying products using various devices across sales channels, tracking every engagement that customers have with the brand, updating customer and product data in real-time along with offering personalized recommendations, and a variety of purchase and delivery options such as BOPIS, click & deliver, endless aisle and BORIS is the essence of being truly omnichannel.
Increased sales: The benefits mentioned above contribute to the primary purpose of unified commerce — offering a seamless customer experience. So, if you provide impeccable services, you can easily retain clients and attract new ones. And, happy clients mean consistently high sales.
One vendor for all your software needs: A unified commerce vendor can provide a single platform that delivers one set of standards to all touchpoints within your customer experience. Because it’s built with connected technology, it also ensures that information flows smoothly across channels. This way, shoppers only have to manage one account for all transactions no matter where they are interacting from with your business. And most importantly, because unified commerce is fully integrated with data analytics capabilities, you will be able to measure return on investment (ROI) on every channel at every stage of your customer life cycle. That means, you can leverage real-time insights to deliver an integrated experience that drives conversions across every channel, including brick-and-mortar stores, mobile devices and online portals.

FAQs

What is unified commerce?

Unified commerce is a strategy that centralizes the data you've collected about customers and products on a single platform. These platforms can interconnect systems of e-commerce, mobile commerce, customer relationship management, order management systems, omnichannel order fulfilment, analytics and more to help provide insights into how to improve the customer experience. Bearing in mind that the goal of unified commerce is to promote personalized shopping experiences that meet consumer expectations, it is necessary to align all the sales channels to offer the same information that the customer expects, ensure there is a constant flow of information being shared, and reduce data silos on a given channel. When leveraged in this way, you might see benefits such as:

Viewing and updating stock in real-time.
Delivering quick and easy experiences and increasing customer satisfaction, as having an enhanced point-of-sale system can provide valuable data and greater ease in automatic payments at the checkout.
Reducing time spent on integrations since you no longer have various channels across multiple platforms.
Simplifying data analysis, performance and KPIs.

How is unified commerce different from the more common omni-channel strategies?

The key difference between unified commerce solutions and omnichannel retail solutions is that unified commerce unifies, orchestrates, and provides seamless experiences across channels. Whereas, the main goal of omni-channel retail is to give customers an overall experience that gives them an accurate view of all products across all platforms.

Systems that support online shopping and those that aid offline businesses are sometimes meant to work in silos as they are not designed to communicate with the other types of systems. As a result, retailers with omni-channel ambitions are forced to tie together systems that often are not designed for connectivity, which is reflected in poor API connectivity or the use of dated forms of file exchanges. By connecting data across channels in real-time through unified commerce technology, you are giving customers a single fluid experience whether they are purchasing online or offline.

How do you know if unified commerce is the right strategy for your retail business?

Any retailer who is active online, offline, and on social media can benefit from and create value by simplifying their IT landscape. The organization must have a natural willingness to modify its structure and processes. When you sell through marketplaces, you might want to be able to serve customers coming directly to your stores with a return. By having all the customer data in one place you can start thinking about offering unified commerce services.

How should retailers start their unified commerce strategy?

Retailers will need to be ready for a unified commerce world. The first step should include a strategy to prepare your retail business for a world where omnichannel, supply chain integration, and customer service optimization are expected. A high-quality shopping experience is no longer enough—consumers want an engaging experience that offers them value, both in terms of pricing as well as functionality. Once they've gotten used to those benefits from other companies, they expect those same things from you.

How to succeed with a unified commerce strategy?

Chief among the many misconceptions about a successful unified commerce strategy is that more features mean greater success. This isn’t true. What is true is that each feature needs to be part of a cohesive, well-executed plan to drive engagement, conversion, and loyalty across channels. Though they may vary widely in size and complexity, all successful unified commerce strategies share one common set of elements:

A desire to serve customers in a better manner at every stage of their journey.
A clear understanding of where both customers and sales happen in your industry.
The ability to see these two different things at once.
An understanding that it's possible and also profitable to own every stage of your customer's path to purchase.
An awareness that technology can help you accomplish all these things.
And finally, an understanding that properly implementing these concepts requires careful planning.

To learn more about how you can leverage these ideas into actionable results for your retail business, reach out to us today!

How can you find the right partner(s) to make this happen?

Choosing the right technology partner is a crucial step in launching a new unified commerce solution. Not only will you need to make sure you’re looking at vendors with proven scalability, but also make sure they can accommodate all of your unique needs and demands as well. Don’t forget to include details about how your company works from the top down, including resolving customer service issues. After doing some research into your local market, here are two things you should keep in mind when choosing a partner: integration strategy and functionality capabilities.

First, find out if these providers have experience working with your specific vertical or industry. Do they have examples of companies that look like yours on their client list? Even more important is asking if it’s possible for them to integrate with what you already use. Take a long hard look at what business systems your retail business already uses and make sure your potential vendor has had successful integrations with similar systems in other clients.

To truly get it right, get everyone involved in one room early on—your representatives from e-commerce and sales channels included!

What is 4 + 5 ?

94356

ETP Group is a leading Unified Commerce Software company, with a 36 year track record of delivering enterprise class retail technology solutions. Market leading retailers in Asia Pacific use ETP across hundreds of thousands of employees, over 500 brands and across 24 countries.

ETP’s comprehensive AI powered solution suites, ETP Unify and Ordazzle, encompass a broad spectrum of e-commerce and retail functionality, from POS, CRM, OMS, PIM, Unified Inventory to Unified promotions, Logistics management and seamless integration with marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. ETP’s Unified Commerce Retail Platforms creates a frictionless and consistent shopping experience for consumers across all channels, wherever, whenever, and however they choose to shop.

ETP’s strength lies in its ability to provide robust and innovative retail solutions built with the most scalable and secure technology, MACH architecture and beautiful UI design. ETP’s “asset-light” solutions minimise IT administrative costs, enabling businesses to focus on growth and strategic initiatives.

Pages

Understanding Unified Commerce and Why You Need It In Your Retail Business

Understanding Unified Commerce