


Posted in Digital Commerce
June 3, 2021
Omnichannel commerce vs. Unified commerce
- Omnichannel commerce.
“Omni-channel retail (or omnichannel commerce) is a multichannel approach to sales that focus on providing seamless customer experience whether the client is shopping online from a mobile device, a laptop or in a brick-and-mortar store.” - bloomreach - Unified commerce.
“Unified commerce is the practice of connecting your backend systems with your customer-facing channels via a single platform. It’s the setup companies require in order to support omnichannel journeys and create a unified view of shopper interactions, products, and management systems.” - BigCommerce
“Omni” is the root word for “all” in Latin, so omnichannel should translate to “all channel”. This is correct in a way. While your message, product or service may get pushed out to “all channels” with an omnichannel commerce strategy, that is about where it ends. The critical data you need to make decisions doesn’t necessarily circle back to you in a cohesive or centralized manner.
This is where unified commerce differs. With a unified commerce ecosystem and strategy, not only can you reach all of your customers anywhere they are, but the data from each channel comes back to your team to be used to create an overarching, unified strategy.
The following table takes a quick look at some of the differences between omnichannel commerce and unified commerce.
Unified commerce is a marketing strategy, but it is also a technical infrastructure strategy. Building a unified ecosystem that controls all your sales channels and can consolidate data has great power. It has the ability to streamline processes, build in business automation and improve customer experience.
Unified commerce enables organizations to become more competitive, drive up sales and improve customer engagement through:
- Inventory visibility across all channels.
- Ease and speed of order fulfillment.
- Improved communication tools, internally and externally.
There are several ways a unified commerce strategy will help in growing a business:
- Automating manual business processes.
- Improved forecasting with complete data.
- Reduced errors from human mistakes.
- Increased sales through synchronized channels.
Unified commerce will help grow your business by breaking down the walls between internal channel silos and leveraging a common commerce platform. It offers a real-time holistic view of the entire enterprise — empowering finely-tuned insights that drive margins upward and create new strategic possibilities.
Ready to move your business to a unified commerce strategy? Our consultants would be happy to talk you through it.