Unified commerce

Unified commerce means running all of a retailer's ways of selling, its stores, website, app and marketplace listings, on one shared record of stock, orders and customers. Any channel can then sell any item that the business has anywhere, and any store or warehouse can fill the order. A channel is one place where the retailer sells, such as a store or an app.

Here is the problem it solves. Many retailers grew one channel at a time. The stores had a billing system, the website had its own stock count, and each marketplace was updated from a spreadsheet. A shirt could sit unsold in a store in Indore while the website showed it as out of stock. Unified commerce puts one system in the middle.

Here is how it works in general. Every item in every store and warehouse is counted in one central record. Each store's billing system and each warehouse management system report every change to it. Every channel reads that record, so each one shows what the business really has, and where. When an order comes in from any channel, the system decides which location should fill it: the warehouse, the store nearest the customer, or the store with the most of that item. That location picks and packs the order, or keeps it ready for the customer to collect. The sale, the stock change and the customer's history are recorded once. So a return can be accepted in any store, and loyalty points earned online can be used at the counter.

Take, for example, a supermarket chain whose app delivers in minutes. In omnichannel retail of this kind, the same store serves walk-in customers and packs app orders from the same shelves, because both read one stock count.

Consider a shoe shop that does not have a customer's size. The cashier's retail POS shows that another store has the pair, and orders it to be delivered to the customer's home.

For instance, a fashion brand's order management system sends a website order to the store two kilometres from the buyer, instead of to a warehouse in another state.

How is unified commerce different from omnichannel? Both words describe selling through many channels. Omnichannel describes what the customer experiences: they can move between the app and the store. Unified commerce describes how it is built: one system for all of it, rather than separate systems joined by daily updates. Unified commerce is also wider than multichannel inventory management, which only keeps the stock count the same everywhere. Unified commerce adds the orders, the customers and the choice of which store ships each order.