Unified commerce helps large merchants manage the complexity of modern shopping

Advances in technology are blurring the lines between sales channels. For the consumers, this means an unprecedented degree of flexibility and convenience. For merchants, it adds a whole new dimension of complexity, making it harder to keep track of revenue streams and customer data. Unified commerce can help merchants take back control.

There was a time when being a merchant was a simple affair. Whatever you were selling, you usually did so through a single channel, such as a physical store. Those days are long gone.

Today, numerous digital solutions enable merchants to engage their customers across all channels and touchpoints, including online, mobile, social media and in-store. Consumers have become accustomed to being able to quickly look up a product online, compare prices and availability and place an order – for example for pickup at a local store through click and collect.

This development means that merchants should be able to begin a payment process on a tablet or mobile device and finish it on a laptop or somewhere else. In some cases, even allowing the consumer to split their buying journey, for instance ordering something online and picking up part of the order in one location and the rest somewhere else, using different payment methods.

A more complex backend landscape

While this enhanced shopping experience provides consumers with a great degree of flexibility and convenience, it makes it harder for merchants to maintain a holistic overview of all relevant data, optimize sales flows and manage internal processes.

Consider the following example:

1. Frank and Anna are doing a home renovation project. They spend some time online looking for inspiration and finding out which materials they need.

2. Together, they visit the web shop of a large home improvement brand and place an order.

3. They choose Click & Collect, selecting the physical location closest to their home for pickup.

4. However, some of the materials they need are not in stock at the desired location. Instead, they get the option of picking up the majority of their order at the original location and the remaining items at a different location.

5. Completing the order, they pay for everything using a credit card.

6. Frank immediately drives to the closest store to pick up the majority of the order.

7. The next day, Anna picks up the remaining items on her way home from work. Standing in line, she remembers that her car needs washer fluid, so she grabs a can from a nearby shelf.

8. At the counter, Anna adds the washer fluid to the order and pays for it using a different credit card.

For Frank and Anna, their purchase is quite flexible and convenient, smartly designed to accommodate their preferences and minimize friction on the path to checkout.

For the merchant, the order is a complex mixture of different payment methods, transaction dates and delivery locations. If the web shop and the two physical stores are separate franchises within the same organization, the complexity increases even further.

Unified commerce provides a holistic overview

In order to manage this increasing complexity, merchants are increasingly looking to the concept of unified commerce.

Rather than being tied to a specific product or platform, unified commerce is a mindset, a strategic approach to breaking down the barriers between sales channels, both frontend and backend. Unified commerce aims to provide merchants with a single view of the customer, collecting data and insights from multiple channels and integrating them towards the same endpoint.

According to a Nets survey of 363 merchants in the retail, restaurant and hotels sector, 60 percent of the respondents have connected payments to their order system regardless of channel. And 50 percent have integrated technical solutions for both online and physical channels with unified systems for the transactions and reporting.

Unified commerce enables merchants to answer questions like:

• What is the total value of purchases made by this specific customer?

• What does the buyer’s journey look like? Are they starting online and finishing in physical stores or vice versa?

• Where is the customer coming from?

• Is it a recurring or new customer?

• How do we leverage our customer and transaction data to increase sales?

This provides merchants with much better control over the sales process and order management.

Gain valuable insights in the unified commerce report from Nets

Curious about the impact of unified commerce and how to implement it? A new unified commerce report from Nets provides an in-depth and accurate depiction of the topic, based on the real-world experiences and insights of those at the forefront of the industry.

This report is based on survey responses of merchants from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The majority of merchants have a turnover of more than 9M Euro.