From single channel to multichannel and omnichannel, and now onto unified commerce, each term represents a stage in enhancing the retail customer experience. But what distinguishes these concepts, and how do businesses decide which approach to adopt? This blog focuses on omnichannel vs. unified commerce, defining each term and explaining how to choose between the two.
What is Omnichannel?
Omnichannel retailing focuses on integrating marketing efforts and improving customer experiences across multiple channels. However, its implementation can vary significantly, sometimes depending on separate teams for integration, which can lead to inconsistency. While omnichannel strategies aim to create a seamless customer experience, relying on multiple integrated software solutions can make it challenging to maintain efficiency. In cases where the customer experience appears smooth but operational back-end struggles exist, the facade of seamlessness may crumble, potentially leading to customer dissatisfaction at critical moments.
What is Unified Commerce?
Unified commerce represents the next level of integrated commerce, blending online and offline channels to present a comprehensive view of the customer from the back end while delivering seamless experiences at the front end. This approach dissolves marketing silos and places a strong emphasis on enhancing the customer experience across all touchpoints. Unlike its predecessors, unified commerce operates on a single platform, ensuring real-time updates and interactions, eliminating discrepancies between channels, and simplifying retail operations management.
Key Differences Between Omnichannel vs Unified Commerce
Omnichannel and unified commerce differ in several key ways, including:
Number of Software Solutions
Omnichannel employs multiple integrated software solutions, typically with different systems managing different channels. This can lead to a more complex infrastructure where integration between systems is necessary but potentially cumbersome. On the other hand, unified commerce involves a single platform that centralizes all retail operations, including sales, inventory, customer service, and more. This ensures real-time updates across all channels, providing a consistent and seamless customer experience.
Focus
For omnichannel, the focus is on the channels–integrating customer experiences across online and offline platforms to ensure they are seamless and consistent. While it aims to provide a cohesive experience, it emphasizes improving each channel individually within the broader ecosystem. In contrast, unified commerce shifts the focus to the entire customer journey, aiming to provide a seamless experience regardless of how or where the customer interacts with the brand. It emphasizes a holistic view of the customer and their interactions across all touchpoints, leveraging a single platform to manage these engagements.
Data Synchronization
While striving for integration, omnichannel solutions can sometimes struggle with real-time data synchronization across all channels, leading to potential discrepancies in inventory, pricing, and customer information. Conversely, unified commerce offers real-time data synchronization as a core feature, ensuring that all channels are updated successfully. This reduces the chances of errors and enhances the ability to provide a cohesive customer experience.
Customer Experience
Omnichannel retail aims to enhance customer experience by making it consistent across different channels. However, the reliance on multiple systems can sometimes create friction in achieving a seamless experience. In contrast, by operating from a single platform, unified commerce naturally fosters a frictionless customer experience, as all interactions, regardless of channel, are informed by the same comprehensive view of the customer's journey.
Efficiency and Complexity
Omnichannel retail can be operationally complex due to the need to integrate and manage multiple systems and data sources, which can also affect the agility of the business in responding to market changes. Unified commerce simplifies operations by reducing the complexity of managing multiple systems, leading to improved efficiency, better decision-making capabilities, and faster response times to market demands.
Choosing Between Unified Commerce vs Omnichannel
The choice between unified commerce and omnichannel comes down to the business priorities: a channel-focused approach or a customer-centric strategy. If the goal is to transcend channel boundaries and create an interconnected ecosystem where the customer experience is paramount, then unified commerce is the way forward. While still effective in enhancing customer experiences, the omnichannel approach may not fully meet the growing demand for a truly integrated shopping experience. As customer expectations continue to rise, many businesses look towards unified commerce as the more advanced and efficient solution.
Unified Commerce with Encora
Encora has a long history of delivering exceptional software engineering & product engineering services across a range of tech-enabled industries. Encora's team of software engineers is experienced in innovative retail solutions, which is why fast-growing companies partner with Encora to outsource product development and drive growth. We are deeply expert in the various disciplines, tools, and technologies that power the emerging economy, and this is one of the primary reasons that clients choose Encora over the many strategic alternatives that they have.
To learn more about unified commerce, contact Encora today!
