Do you ever consider how to integrate all of your channels into a unified sales strategy? Managing and combining offline and online channels effectively can be very challenging in today's retail environment. A unified commerce strategy ensures your business runs efficiently at all levels, from enhancing customer experiences to streamlining operations and increasing profitability. But how do you build a unified commerce strategy for your business? Well, let's take a peek at the essential steps to getting started.
Know What Unified Commerce Is
Before discussing the strategy, it’s important to first understand the concept of unified commerce. So, what exactly does unified commerce mean? A unified commerce strategy integrates all sales channels, including physical stores, e-commerce, mobile applications, and social media, into a single platform. This way, real-time data sharing occurs between all channels to ensure that customers are presented with a seamless shopping experience.
For example, a customer may view your website, add an item to their shopping cart, and later walk into your physical store to purchase the product. With unified commerce, all of the customer's data will follow them throughout their journey, ensuring a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
Below are the steps to develop a unified commerce strategy for your business:
Step 1: Identify Your Business Needs
Identifying your business needs is the first step in building a unified commerce strategy. Each business is unique, so it's important to understand what works for you. Start by evaluating the sales channels you currently have in place. Do you have an e-commerce store, a physical store, or perhaps both? Are your customers actively engaging through these channels?
Next, analyze your internal processes. Do you have to handle inventory, orders, and customer data differently for each channel? Perhaps you are dealing with slow updates, inaccurate stock level calculations, or poor customer experiences. Identify these gaps, and you'll know which areas to focus on.
Step 2: Centralize Your Inventory and Data
One of the primary purposes of a unified commerce strategy is centralization. All inventory and data should be centralized. This means having a system that allows for a view of inventory levels, customer data, and sales performance across all channels in real-time.
This is the reason why an integrated system reduces situations like overselling or stockouts. Take, for example, your system when a customer places an order online for a certain item. Your system could automatically update your stock to reflect which items you still have on hand and how much inventory is left in stores and on the website. It allows you to manage your business without jeopardizing customer satisfaction.
Step 3: Choose an Appropriate Technology
Proper technology forms the basis of a successful unified commerce strategy. You will need tools that support integration between your online and offline channels.
You are not done unless you have a robust Point of Sale system. Modern POS systems don't just handle transactions; they connect with your e-commerce platform, inventory management system, and customer database. This ensures that every aspect of your business operates smoothly. Complementary functionalities enable you to monitor and study the purchase behavior of your customers with a CRM application. This allows you to provide a personalized shopping experience, for example, by offering items to purchase based on previous transactions.
Orders, including online or in-store orders, are processed as soon as possible with an effective order management system. This further helps you make flexible services such as buy-online-pick-up-in-store, home delivery, and many more.
Step 4: Improvement of Customer Experience
An ideal outcome of a unified commerce strategy is to give customers an effortless and enjoyable shopping experience. Whether they want to browse through your website, visit your store, or engage with your brand on social media, they will always have consistency in the same products, offers, and customer service.
That means the first thing would be to personalize the customer journey. Based on real-time data, you can follow up on the customer's preferences and tailor your campaigns accordingly. For example, an online retailer can offer something to a customer based on previous purchases or suggest complementary products when customers are viewing a store online.
Streamline your checkout process as much as possible to minimize friction. It doesn't matter if your customer is paying online through mobile apps or in-store—the process should be quick, easy, and secure.
Step 5: Training Your People
Your employees become a part of your unified commerce strategy. They need to know about this unified system and how it should be used with the tools available to them. Begin by training your employees on the new technology that you implement. Teach your employees how to use the POS system efficiently and manage inventory, as well as allow them access to current customer data. These steps will enable your employees to better assist consumers in either order entry or answering questions regarding an item's availability.
Let them know that their first and foremost concern should be customer service. With the data they obtain from CRM analytics, they'll be able to provide customers with better one-on-one contact, which helps in fostering customer loyalty.
Step 6: Monitoring and Improvement of Your Strategy
After setting up your unified commerce strategy, your only job is to monitor and analyze its performance. Analyze your sales figures, feedback from customers, and stock levels at regular intervals to ensure everything is going according to plan.
If there are areas that are inefficiently performed, you are well within your rights to adjust things. These could be cases where particular goods run out quickly, and you probably need to reorder or tweak the supply chain. Similarly, if customers are abandoning their carts because they want to make the checkout process simple, then you may want to revamp yours.
Through these proactive steps and moving by the data insights obtained, you will continue to keep an optimization for the long run.
ETP Group: Empower Retail Solutions
ETP Group is a company that helps businesses implement solutions into a unified commerce strategy. Our innovative tools help integrate all of your sales channels and, therefore, yield real-time visibility of inventory, customer data, and sales performance.
Whether your business idea is a brick-and-mortar store, a venture through an e-commerce portal, or a mobile app, ETP Group will deliver solutions through which customers can seamlessly shop from your virtual space. Our technology and support offerings ensure that your business centralizes all operations, becomes much more efficient, and maximizes customer satisfaction.
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Unified commerce by BPR states that ‘unified commerce places the customer experience as first priority by leveraging a single commerce platform.
ETP retail software can help retailers unify their customer experience across all channels.
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