Unified Commerce: The Future of Successful Trade

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One of the most significant impacts of e-commerce is the increased expectations customers have of retail. With increasing competition, traditional marketing and sales strategies are no longer sufficient to provide an unforgettable 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 the benchmark for cross-channel customer experience in e-commerce. However, the systems behind them are often not connected or interact with each other only to a limited extent. As a result, the shopping experience is not consistent across all channels. Unified commerce, the further development of omnichannel, replaces cross-channel inconsistency.


Essentially, unified commerce is a single, centralized platform. By integrating communication channels on a single platform, the unified commerce strategy enables a customer experience across all touchpoints. Unlike the other approaches, the unified commerce strategy puts the customer at the center. This offers customers a personalized experience in real time, even when they change channels.

Unified Commerce combines e-commerce, order management, customer luxembourg consumer email list relationship management, point of sale and much more in one platform. Due to the extensive topic, in the following sections I will primarily address 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 had a presence across multiple channels, with each channel collecting a large amount of data. The resulting data silos not only contained a lot of redundant data, but also prevented targeted and cross-utilization of the data, as the silos were usually viewed separately from one another. As a result, executives made decisions based on incomplete and inconsistent data, making it difficult to take meaningful action to improve the customer experience.


Building a Customer Data Platform

In order 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 "packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems." In other words, as a software package that creates a permanent, unified customer database that other systems can access. By combining data from different sources, a 360° view of customers can be created. The extensive data collection is also ideal for the use of machine learning, for example when identifying market trends, personalized product recommendations or price optimization.