Unified Commerce has become the lifeline for the mid-sized retailers who wish to sell their products to customers across multiple platforms. Building an eCommerce website with unified commerce solutions is the key that will unlock the answers to buyers’ need for a wholesome, consistent, and integrated experience from retailers’ both brick and mortar and online stores.
In a nutshell, unified Commerce offers retailers an omni-channel commerce platform that fulfills the following customer expectations:
– Shop at a specific location without any problem
– Get personalized services and information from a specific brand across all their stores
– Customers receive what they want instantly, even if the product is unavailable in the specific store branch
– Expect shopping cart continuity across all platforms
The Future of Retail is in the Hands of Unified Commerce – What is It?
Retailers implement different business applications to run their stores, such as retail POS systems, loyalty programs, eCommerce platforms, inventory management, and CRM. Retailers must gather huge amounts of customer data through business applications or touchpoints to deliver efficient service. However, instead of disconnected business applications, they need a robust and integrated platform to analyze the collected data, generate meaningful insights, and share it among the stakeholders to provide the most incredible shopping experience.
Solution: A Unified Commerce Platform, where online stores and eCommerce channels are effectively synced!
From eCommerce to Omnichannel to Unified Commerce: No More Confusing Customers’ Journey
Unified commerce business application puts together everything in one single platform – eCommerce, inventory management, in-store customer data, orders, checkouts, POS sale capabilities, and customer relationship management. It breaks down the walls between multi-store silos and uses a common platform.
An example will be helpful:
“Alex visits your store located on Jackson Street to test a few refrigerators for his home. However, he says to the in-store staff that he needs some time to decide. The staff obliges, as she doesn’t feel pressured to close the sale on the spot. Meanwhile, Alex goes home and finds that the products have been automatically added to a wish list, emailed to his mail id. He could easily move the items to the cart and pay for them whenever and however he wanted. He also finds that he could use the coupon code provided at the store while making the online payment and decide between in-store pickup and home-delivery”.
Unified Commerce is like a wholesome shopping experience for both buyers and retailers – customers can start their journey in the store and finish it online. In contrast, retailers can minimize the risks of losing the Customer to another store or ecommerce brand.
Why Switch from Omnichannel to Unified Commerce You May Ask
It is all about the best customer experience wherever they are with you – where all your selling channels work together to provide a combined buyer journey. Omnichannel retail solutions allow retailers to use different platforms to drive sales and engage customers, including social media sales, eCommerce, retail POS system, retail store system, ERP solutions, CRM, supply chain, and other mediums. And these mediums are often implemented, so it becomes difficult for the omni-channel approach to combine the back-end capabilities of each platform, link data, and perform analytics.
It creates many business silos, and while the approach works for short-term goals, it doesn’t provide a user-friendly and personalized customer experience – the need for the day. Customer expectations towards brands are rising by the day, and competition isn’t helping to slow down. An optimized shopping experience that allows customers to buy, engage and experience from a single source is crucial.
Unified Commerce provides precisely that, cost-effectively. .
Advantages of Unified Commerce for Retailers
Unified ecommerce shopping experience is designed to fulfill the needs of modern customers who zig-zag through various mediums to complete shopping. The benefits of unified ecommerce store development for retailers are 50% more premium than omnichannel and ecommerce mobile shopping.
A Single Platform to Manage All Your Data:
One-data model will enable everyone in your company to find complete customer information in one place, which will improve customer interaction.
Increased ROI:
A single, systematized commerce platform will significantly reduce overhead, IT and inventory management costs, and sales loss and boost employee efficiency and inventory turnover.
Customer-Centric Products and Prices:
If your Customer doesn’t find size 44 Red Jacket in your store branch, you can locate it in another branch and get it delivered to his place on the same day.
Boost Customer Satisfaction by 38%:
Synchronized and centralized eCommerce store can increase conversion rate, marketing efficiency, and avg. order value, thereby improving the bottom line.
Make Informed Decision:
One-point of access for customer preferences and purchase history for all channels will enable retailers to make the best decisions for pricing, incentives, promotions, and more.
Dynamic 365 POS System:
Use advanced technology for the POS system that allows fast customer processing in real-time – mobile payments, self-checkouts, consumer purchase history, and online order.
Become One of the First Few Users of Modern POS:
Research shows only 28% of retailers have updated their POS technology, and the average age of retail POS is 6.7 years. You could be one of the first few.
Best Inventory Management System:
Unified commerce platform enables retailers to view and manage entire inventory across all channels in real-time, providing better figures for overselling and underselling.
Accurate Cross-Channel Shopping Experience:
A dated POS hardware could have slow processing speed, less storage space, and staggered customer data access, which cannot deliver the best customer experience.
Efficient Buyers Journey:
With multiple ways to buy a product, track its shipping, and make payment, order management is simplified across all touchpoints. Retailers can also embed shipping to the POS.
Personalize Ad Campaigns:
Real-time tracking of customer interaction with the brand between multiple channels can help businesses in ecommerce manipulate or change ad targeting and improve customization.
Ease of Exchange and Returns:
Synching online and offline storefronts will help brands provide the best post-purchase services. E.g. Customer sees the shoe at Store A, purchase online, and return it in Store B.
Efficiently Onboard and Train New Staff:
It is easier to train staff one system than numerous business applications, enabling employees to intelligently and quickly learn marketing management.
Unified Commerce vs. Multi-Channel vs. Omni-Channel
What Retailers Get from Unified eCommerce Platform?
Unified Commerce takes you beyond the great ‘omni-channel’ experience. While omnichannel is mind-blowing, Unified Commerce is one step ahead, as it includes the retail business. Customer is everything, and retailers have realized that to provide a wholesome customer experience, they have to break down the barriers between different internal departments and make everything one whole service platform.
Here are ways that unified commerce development can help support and grow your business across a broad customer base:
1. You don’t have to deal with separate systems to manage sales, inventory, or ecommerce portal – integration, maintenance, upgrades, and implementation are centralized, which reduces ecommerce store development costs and efforts.
2. You and all other stakeholders involved in the business will get access to one version of data = one version of the truth. This will streamline budgeting, financial reporting, planning, tracking customer history and buying patterns, analyzing product marketing and sales performance, and making fast decisions.
3. As a retailer, you will provide an interactive, hands-on customer shopping experience in the store, powered by digital technology.
4. You will have an all-encompassing view of the product inventory across all channels and all locations in real-time. One quick scan through warehouses, locations, distribution centers, and stores can help you evaluate stock levels.
5. You can compare past and present inventory data to derive trends in sales and forecast and plan growth strategies based on real-time statistics.
6. This IoT based Cloud commerce solution is perfect for digital-savvy customers. Such consumers are more knowledgeable and connected across multiple channels. They don’t stop at one shop or store – they have a list of several retailers. They compare prices, value propositions, and engagement opportunities. But above all, they value personalized services across all shopping channels.
7. It acts as a business intelligence tool that helps you bring together customer data, behavior, and interactions at one place that help predict and plan special offers based on customer desires and needs.
8. Product and customer information is maintained in a single database, shared to different touchpoints. This reduces delay in communication and risks of errors, such as advertising a wrong product price, promoting a faulty product to a Customer, selling a product online out of stock, or describing a work inappropriately.
9. Data from predictive analytics can help you develop AR/VR experiences to appeal to and engage customers’ visual sensibilities.
10. Finally, as the line between physical retail stores and online shopping starts to vanish further, unified Commerce will be a requirement and not just another badge to your business accomplishments. At a future date, you might have to shell out more money in developing a unified omnichannel solution as the skill demand increases.
So start switching to the future of Unified Commerce with CGVAK.
We can help you switch to the future of Unified Commerce with Microsoft Dynamics 365, uber-cool, next-gen Cloud-based Unified commerce framework and other ecommerce store development services. The creators designed the platform to centralize customer service, sales and marketing, and operations in a single business application. With Dynamics 365, you will also enjoy the functionalities of Microsoft Office 365, Azure Machine Learning, Cortana Intelligence, and other Microsoft Productivity Tools. Microsoft also offers a gamut of personalization options for retailers to accommodate their store’s needs.
Besides, when you work with us, our certified developers will make sure you take advantage of Dynamic 365’s exclusive data intelligence tools, such as Azure and Microsoft Power BI. These tools help gather, organize and analyze data in the most useful manner.
Unified Commerce is all you need to help modern consumer challenges that all retailers face. Contact our experts to discover how this magnificent omnipresent, multi-faceted, single-app platform can help you score a perfect customer experience every day, consistently.