Imagine an airport where every flight’s scheduling, luggage handling, and boarding process relied on separate, disconnected systems. Sure, it might work at first, but gradually inefficiencies would multiply, delays would pile up, and the customer experience would suffer.
Now, imagine an airport where all channels, operations and back-end processes are well-connected. Alongside creating a more consistent customer experience, this means staff don’t have to spend time manually cross-referencing and updating different systems, flight information is always up-to-date, and the airport is more efficient and profitable as a whole.
This level of integration is only possible because businesses—or the airport in this scenario—have taken a unified approach, leveraging one centralised platform.
This is no different to retail. As businesses face mounting pressure to cut costs while driving growth, unified commerce is emerging as a powerful way to achieve both operational efficiency and performance.
Let’s unpack a few ways this approach can boost your retail operations and help your business take off.
Offer flexible checkout options
Many of today’s shoppers blend in-store shopping with online interactions. They might search for a product online before going in-store to buy it—something 66% of Australians do according to Shopify research—or they could head in-store to browse and try something on, only to purchase it weeks or months later during an online sale.
Because the shopping journey isn’t always linear, retailers looking to cater to a diverse range of shoppers effectively need more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Unified commerce gives merchants visibility of their entire inventory and operations, so they can offer more flexible checkout options that bridge digital and physical touchpoints.
Australian shoe brand Bared Footwear, for example, uses Shopify’s ship-to-customer feature to turn their physical stores into endless aisles. If one store doesn’t have a particular size or colour in stock, floor staff can ship the order to the customer’s preferred address from another store. For in-store customers who need more time to decide if they want to purchase an item, employees can email a pre-loaded cart so they can complete their purchase online later. And by offering an array of options that suit diverse shopping habits, merchants can reduce friction and capture more sales.
Unlock a 360° view with unified analytics
A unified commerce approach also helps retailers analyse customer behaviour across different channels. Imagine that you’ve launched a new collection and are interested in learning which channel is most effective for driving click-throughs so you can offer a targeted discount or you want to understand why more of your customers are abandoning their carts at checkout. While you might be able to get the information to figure this out without a unified commerce platform, it would be challenging and time-consuming.
By consolidating analytics, retailers get a holistic view of each customer’s shopping journeys, run reports with a few clicks and act on real-time insights. Unifying data also fuels greater personalisation, helping merchants integrate data-driven features and marketing automations that add value while reducing repetitive work. For instance, The Memo leverages previous purchases and search data through Shopify Flow to inform customers when their favourite items are back in stock.
Stay ahead of stockouts with real-time updates
Few things are as frustrating to a consumer as when an item listed as available is actually out of stock. Inventory mismatches, like stockouts and overstocking, cost retailers a staggering $1.77 trillion globally.
Unified commerce empowers merchants with the tools to provide product updates in real time, which is crucial for maintaining customer trust. By synchronising inventory and sales channels, merchants can move stock based on demand and anticipate the need to reorder items, reducing the likelihood of lost sales. With multiple storefronts often leading to more price discrepancies between channels, unifying your operations also makes it easy to adjust prices and ensure they are consistent across listings.
Streamline staff training and processes
Employee training is a crucial part of maintaining a healthy retail business, yet it can be challenging to get right. Adopting a unified approach simplifies onboarding and reduces the likelihood of human error. This is because unifying operations through a single platform streamlines processes, so teams can focus on mastering one cohesive system instead of juggling multiple logins and interfaces.
Being able to easily automate inventory and customer information updates also means employees have less manual data entry to handle and ensures consistency across every store and channel.
With systems like Shopify POS, retailers can also benefit from built-in support for training and performance management. Merchants can create employee profiles to track sales performance and identify areas they may benefit from additional training, and new starters can use the POS in ‘training’ mode, allowing them to practice without affecting transaction history or inventory data.
The flight path for growth
Ultimately, unified commerce is about breaking down the barriers between channels, and back-end and front-end operations so merchants can deliver a seamless and efficient experience wherever shoppers choose to engage.
By making sure each part of the retail business is interconnected, businesses can offer more flexible checkout options, make smarter decisions based on unified data, provide real-time products and streamline staff training. In doing so, they position themselves for success in today’s competitive retail landscape.
Shaun Broughton is managing director for Asia Pacific & Japan at Shopify.