Unified Commerce: The Future of Business Success
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2025 4:21 am
One of the most significant effects of e-commerce is the rise in customer expectations of retailers. In the face of increasing competition, traditional marketing and sales strategies are no longer sufficient to deliver a memorable customer experience. The shopping experience must be consistent across all sales channels. This gave rise to the concept of omnichannel , which has long served as a benchmark for multichannel customer experience in e-commerce. But the systems behind it are often not connected or only interact with each other to a small extent. As a result, the shopping experience is not consistent across all channels. Unified commerce, the evolution of omnichannel, replaces channel inconsistency.
At its core, unified commerce is a single, central platform. By integrating communication channels into a single platform, a unified commerce strategy enables a single customer experience across all touchpoints. Unlike other approaches, a unified commerce strategy puts the customer at the center, offering customers a personalized experience in real time, even when switching channels.
Unified commerce combines e-commerce, order part time data management, customer relationship management, point of sale, and much more into a single platform. Due to the broad scope of the topic, in the following sections I will focus primarily on the relevance of the customer data platform and explain how order management can be optimized through unified commerce.
Why is a customer data platform essential for unified commerce?
In the past, companies were present across multiple channels, each collecting a large amount of data. The resulting data silos not only contained a lot of redundant data, but also prevented selective and cross-functional use of data, as silos were often considered separately. As a result, managers made decisions based on incomplete and inconsistent data, making it difficult to take meaningful action to improve the customer experience.
Create a customer data platform
To achieve a seamless customer experience in line with the unified commerce strategy, it is necessary to bring all data together in one platform. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) is used for data collection. The CDP Institute defines a Customer Data Platform as “a software package that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” In other words, a software package that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. By bringing together data from different sources, a 360° view of customers can be created. The extensive data collection is also great for the use of machine learning, for example in determining market trends, personalized product recommendations, or price optimization.
At its core, unified commerce is a single, central platform. By integrating communication channels into a single platform, a unified commerce strategy enables a single customer experience across all touchpoints. Unlike other approaches, a unified commerce strategy puts the customer at the center, offering customers a personalized experience in real time, even when switching channels.
Unified commerce combines e-commerce, order part time data management, customer relationship management, point of sale, and much more into a single platform. Due to the broad scope of the topic, in the following sections I will focus primarily on the relevance of the customer data platform and explain how order management can be optimized through unified commerce.
Why is a customer data platform essential for unified commerce?
In the past, companies were present across multiple channels, each collecting a large amount of data. The resulting data silos not only contained a lot of redundant data, but also prevented selective and cross-functional use of data, as silos were often considered separately. As a result, managers made decisions based on incomplete and inconsistent data, making it difficult to take meaningful action to improve the customer experience.
Create a customer data platform
To achieve a seamless customer experience in line with the unified commerce strategy, it is necessary to bring all data together in one platform. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) is used for data collection. The CDP Institute defines a Customer Data Platform as “a software package that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” In other words, a software package that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. By bringing together data from different sources, a 360° view of customers can be created. The extensive data collection is also great for the use of machine learning, for example in determining market trends, personalized product recommendations, or price optimization.