What: Unified Commerce presents an opportunity for retailers to simplify and reduce complexity while maximising efficiencies by removing all barriers between offline and online commerce.

Why it is important: Studies have shown that successful implementation of Unified Commerce results in companies experiencing higher organic sales growth than their peers. Additionally, experts agree that investing in Unified Commerce is crucial to delivering a holistic seamless customer experience.

Unified Commerce remains somewhat of an emerging concept for retailers and the fashion industry remains largely unprepared for it.

However, a recent survey conducted by Bain & Company found that retailers are enthusiastic about Unified Commerce and 75% of respondents stated that it was a very or extremely important element of CRM. The majority also agreed that it would benefit profitability, employee experience, and inventory management.

Unified Commerce connects omnichannel’s customer-facing focus with the myriad of backend systems associated with running a retail business; it allows retailers to have one promo engine that serves all channels.

Successful implementation of Unified Commerce can result in organic sales growth and aid in creating a seamless customer experience. This is more important than ever as customers expect the same level of personalised experience online as they would in-store.

Ease of deployment and ability to integrate are important for the successful implementation of Unified Commerce. UC can’t be exclusively an IT responsibility and companies must check with store operations to ensure that the technology is easy to use and making their jobs easier.

According to the Bain survey, POS and inventory management are the areas of business retailers believe would be most impacted by Unified Commerce, followed by marketing and order service management.

What is Unified Commerce and why is it so important for fashion retailers?