Integrating a single tool into your ecommerce tech stack can be a huge point of contention. The development cost and complexity of deployment can make the project a nonstarter before the wheels have begun turning.
In response, retailers are pursuing a unified commerce business strategy in which they know who their customers are and deliver consistent shopping experiences across all sales channels. This is made possible by software that combines all sales channels, data, and back-end systems into one platform.
More than just coordinating front-end sales, unified commerce is the key to creating seamless customer experiences, streamlining operations, and driving business growth, making it a strategic imperative for success in the modern retail landscape.
Read on to learn how to implement a unified commerce strategy for your brand, with strategic use cases and examples to guide you through the process.
The evolution beyond omnichannel
The current ecommerce environment is characterized by economic slowdown, increased competition, and higher consumer expectations. Brands need to be more efficient, find new growth strategies, and innovate strategically to succeed.
Some retailers believe unified commerce begins and ends with omnichannel. In response, many have cobbled together a mismatch of systems that don’t seamlessly integrate with one another. Patchy APIs and hefty development costs are required to offer omnichannel shopping experiences. Integration and middleware gaps result in technical debt and inefficiencies that slow back-end operations down.
Unified commerce is about more than just integrating sales channels. It’s a business strategy that can only be unlocked by commerce software with shared data and operations that give you a centralized business “brain.” Whether it’s a native Shopify feature or a third-party app, every piece of data feeds back to this centralized repository for a complete 360-degree view of how your business operates.
The problem with fragmented systems
Data compiled in our Seeing Around Corners report found that most marketers employ between 7 and 10 technologies to execute personalization programs. And whilemany commerce platforms claim to offer unified commerce, their methods are problematic. Gaps in functionality are plugged by third-party apps which are integrated, not unified. This requires middleware, and causes data to be passed back and forth between multiple systems.
The costs of trying to achieve unified commerce with fragmented systems quickly rack up:
- Lack of efficiency due to data-sync issues, integration, and system maintenance costs
- Inability to innovate due to complexities and code breaks
- Slower profitable growth due to missed opportunities, higher costs, and slower time to market
- Technical overheads which cause operational friction, business drag, and innovation deficit
The cost of complexity is becoming too high to bear, and the pace of change too rapid to manage with fragmented systems. You wind up spending more money just to keep things running—and that’s before the development cost of any minor upgrades that improve the customer experience.
A unified commerce strategy, however, centralizes sales channels, operations, back-end workflows, and customer-facing buying experiences. This is critical for scaling businesses for which the costs associated with integrating separate systems can quickly outweigh the benefits.
The power of a truly unified commerce strategy
Unified commerce is a business strategy in which brands aim to know who their customers are and deliver consistent and personalized experiences across every shopping channel. This is achieved through a natively built platform that eliminates the complexities of integrations and middleware, providing a single source of truth for all commerce data. Product, order, and customer data flow into a unified commerce platform, where ecommerce and point-of-sale (POS) solutions are built natively on the same architecture.
Shopify is the only commerce platform that allows brands to execute a truly unified commerce business strategy. Its commerce primitives were built from the ground up and designed to work better together, so that everything operates off of a singular data model. This approach allows you to deliver consistent experiences online, in physical retail locations, and anywhere else customers can find you.
The benefits of this unified approach are tenfold. Instead of patching integrations between different tools to operate your business, a unified commerce solution does it as standard—with no need to switch systems or open several tabs to get a task done.
Customers get the omnichannel experiences they know and love, without you having to experience the mounting pressure of operating a complicated ecommerce infrastructure to make it happen. A unified infrastructure creates a "write-once, deploy-everywhere" capability for updates and features. This reduces the platform’s total cost of ownership—of which Shopify’s has already been proven to be 22% lower than comparable vendors.
Key advantages of a unified commerce strategy
Efficiency
Native unification of POS and ecommerce reduces the need for expensive middleware. This results in streamlined workflows and centralized front- and back-office operations—a plus that Shopify merchants are already benefiting from:
- Apparel brand Bobo Choses reduced time spent resolving technical issues by 80%.
- Luggage retailer Monos reduced staff training time on its POS system to just one half-day.
- Pet food retailer Tomlinson’s applied promotional discounts at the checkout with zero additional taps required—a move that reduced average in-store checkout times by 56%.
These retailers are not alone in their experiences. A recent EY POS market report found that physical retailers using Shopify’s unified POS solution improve staff productivity and save the equivalent of 0.4 full-time employees per store location.
These operational improvements enable up to a 5% uplift in total gross merchandise value (GMV) and a 150% increase in omnichannel GMV growth quarterly on average year-over-year—all while reducing total cost of ownership by 22% relative to the market set surveyed.
“We have gone from spending 80% of our time fixing technical incidents to a number closer to 10%,” says Saül Aleu, chief technology officer at Bobo Choses. “And the time we used to devote to solving technical issues, we now use to add value to the business.”
In other words: The real cost is not in the change to unified commerce—it's in the opportunity cost of waiting.
Growth
When all of your data flows back to a central platform, you’ll have greater access to customer data, including cross-channel insights. Easily find the answers to questions such as: Which channels do my customers prefer to buy through? Which omnichannel personalization strategies do they respond to? And which touchpoints should be given credit towards a sale?
Unified commerce also accelerates business growth across digital and physical channels. You can increase conversion through built-in omnichannel features. Customers can check your website to find inventory levels at their nearest store, or earn loyalty points from purchases via social media storefronts. Even business-to-business (B2B) orders can flow back to the same centralized order management system.
In other words: Shopify becomes a one-brain commerce OS to unify your order, inventory, and customer data—no matter what channel or market you sell in. This presents a vast opportunity to grow without the logistical hassle of managing an omnichannel business.
“Adopting Shopify was a huge moment for Aviator Nation,” says the brand’s director of ecommerce Curtis Ulrich. “If you look at our trajectory over the years, things really started to pick up after we migrated from disparate systems—Adobe Commerce and Lightspeed POS—to Shopify. With Shopify Plus, we have all the tools we need to provide a seamless omnichannel experience and serve more customers no matter where they shop with us.”
Innovation
Innovating on traditional commerce platforms is complex and cumbersome. You’re constantly worried about making sure all of your integrations are talking to each other properly, so that the focus is taken off the end result: improving the shopping experience for customers without proportionally increasing technical complexity.
A composable platform that can be customized and extended allows faster time to market for new omnichannel capabilities. Take advantage of a native Shopify feature, or customize your tech stack with an app integration—both feed back to the central data model that exists in your centralized commerce operating system.
Plus, with Shopify, we're shipping hundreds of updates per year, handling security compliance, and ensuring consistent uptime during peak sales periods—things that brands on other platforms have to worry about building themselves. This frees merchants up to take bigger gambles and experiment more.
Personalization and the unified customer model
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get eyes on your customers. Browsers are limiting cookie usage—and consumers are becoming hyper-aware of the sheer volume of data that brands hold on them.
First-party data that has been willingly contributed by your audience is now the most valuable currency—one that can help deliver on consumers’ expectations for a personalized experience.
A unified commerce strategy supports a unified customer model, integrating all first-party data—such as browsing, purchasing, and order information—in one place. Shopify automatically does this by creating a unified profile as soon as a prospective customer shares their email or phone number, which gives you the chance to personalize their shopping experience before you’ve collected data from their first order.
Any supplementary data collected feeds back to this unified customer profile, such as:
- Products they’ve viewed on your website
- Conversations they’ve had with retail associates in-store
- Loyalty points they’ve earned through a third-party app like Smile
- Email campaigns they’ve engaged with through apps like Klaviyo
- Answers to quizzes you’ve built using apps like Octane AI
This gives you the ability to personalize future outreach. And it works: data compiled in a recent report found that orders are up to 20% larger when using personalized customer profiles.
“Without a holistic view of our customers’ journeys, we knew it would be very difficult to tailor recommendations, personalize communications, and reward loyalty across every sales channel,” says Brendan Gorman, head of ecommerce at Venus et Fleur.
Use this data to segment your customers for more granular targeting. Rely on these segments to retarget potential buyers using features such as:
- Shopify Audiences: Shopify enables you to use customer data from participating merchants to analyze shopper behavior and build smarter targeting lists to plug in to advertising campaigns. Awareness and consideration campaigns using this data can lower customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.
- Shopify Collabs: This feature lets you partner with content creators your target audience knows and loves. Recruit new influencers, send free products, and track commission without leaving your Shopify admin.
- Shopify Collective: With this tool, you can expand your reach and product line by collaborating with other retailers. Every time an order is placed for your inventory on a partner’s website, the details come back to your Shopify Orders tab for fulfillment.
The overarching goal is to capture leads—which spark the creation of new unified profiles—and encourage customers to sign in to an account on your storefront. This gives greater flexibility in how you can personalize—whether that’s dynamic content to showcase promotions similar to those they’ve engaged with before, reviews from other customers who share similar interests, or product pricing in their home currency—using data from their unified customer profile.
As Molly Allen, senior ecommerce manager at Astrid & Miyu, says: “Shopify’s big singular view of our customer is the secret power to scaling fast and managing international growth.”
Shopify’s personalization capabilities don’t stop here. Continue the tailored shopping experience with Shop Pay—the world’s best-converting checkout that’s proven to convert as much as 50% better than typical guest checkout. Users can sign in to their Shop Pay account and prefill checkout fields for one-click checkout, leaving them less time to second guess their purchase and more time eagerly anticipating the arrival of their next order.
Shopify is the only platform that enables truly unified commerce
A unified commerce strategy leads to growth, efficiency, and better customer experience through innovation. But for it to work effectively, the core primitives of commerce exchanges—product, order, and customer data—need to be delivered from a single source of truth.
Shopify is the only platform that does this by natively unifying ecommerce and POS solutions. We invest heavily in R&D—shipping over 200 platform updates and investing $1.7 billion in 2023 alone—to provide the most innovative and flexible commerce operating system for scaling merchants.
Unified commerce strategy FAQ
What is a unified strategy?
Unified commerce is a business strategy where brands aim to know who their customers are and deliver consistent and personalized experiences across every shopping channel.
What is the difference between unified commerce and omnichannel?
Omnichannel is a customer-facing strategy that enables shoppers to shop across multiple channels. Unified commerce is a business strategy where brands aim to deliver consistent experiences no matter where they shop across DTC, online, retail, B2B, and anywhere else they find you.
What is an example of unified commerce?
Buy online, pick up in-store is an example of omnichannel shopping that unified commerce supports. The retailer uses a central repository to store inventory data. Online shoppers can view real-time inventory quantities at their nearest store, pay for their order through the ecommerce site, and have retail staff prepare the order for collection through the POS system.
What is an example of a unified marketing strategy?
An example of a unified marketing strategy is a campaign that spans different channels—including social media, website content, email marketing, and offline ads—using the same data from a centralized commerce platform.
