Retailers that provide a unified commerce experience for omnichannel shoppers are lined up for success in 2023.
1. Consumer habits are changing, and digital is the driving force.
Retail leaders today are responding to changes — sometimes drastic — in how customers shop for products and interact with their business and brand. Generally, shoppers are becoming more connected, more informed and definitively channel agnostic.
Modern consumers do not see channels and demand the same customer experience across all touchpoints. Additionally, while ecommerce shopping is increasing in volume, so is shopping in-store. Today’s customers don’t use a retailer’s digital or physical channels in isolation but, rather, in tandem.
According to Forrester Research, 60% of US online adults and 55% of UK online adults purchase items in-store after researching them online. Moreover, 50% of US online adults and 45% of UK online adults have purchased items online to pick up in a store during the first three months of 2022.
The traditional retail store location is now a cornerstone of digital commerce, and the two once-separate entities now need to become one driving omnichannel force. While shoppers combine the use of multiple channels in their shopping journeys, they expect the channels to work together consistently as well. According to Forbes, 90% of customers expect consistent interactions across sales channels.
2. Associates now need to provide a truly consistent omnichannel experience in stores.
To create customer experience consistency, retail associates need solutions that drive efficiency and provide visibility across all channels.
But building a unified channel-agnostic experience with differentiating digital capabilities to enrich customer and employee engagement — and being able to do so in a scalable manner — is not a straightforward endeavor. Legacy retail architectures are laden with monolithic and closed applications that dramatically hinder a retailer’s ability to evolve in this desired state of future retail.
Retailers need digital technologies that improve store productivity and free associates to deliver an enhanced customer experience for in-store and omnichannel fulfillment. This is achieved with modern unified commerce platform capabilities that bring order management, inventory, fulfillment and customer engagement capabilities to any channel or medium.
Unified commerce gives everyone the same holistic view of customers, their history and their transactions — regardless of how and where they shop. Precision tools for real-time inventory visibility and availability across the enterprise enable omnichannel fulfillment and keep every customer satisfied and coming back.
And with core retail capabilities made readily available to support any customer journey, associates are empowered to create memorable customer experiences at every touchpoint and interaction.
In other words, unified commerce platforms are the fulfillers of the omnichannel retail promise.
3. Retailers providing advanced unified commerce platform architecture are experiencing success.
As consumers demand greater flexibility, personalization and responsiveness from their retail experience, many retailers still lack the retail technology foundation to meet these expectations.
McKinsey & Company found that 65% of companies that are "digital leaders" have a high tolerance for bold initiatives, and among average performers, 70% of companies don’t see support for risk-taking.
This situation is the digital transformation conundrum in retail: exciting, compelling digital tools are available to transform customer and employee experiences to boost the business. Still, they can’t be leveraged due to limitations in legacy retail systems. Unified commerce may be the solution to the digital transformation conundrum and the foundation of modern retail.
In theory, unified commerce brings rich retail business capabilities that can be shared anywhere, shattering boundaries between channels. In reality, a unified commerce platform only delivers value when built with modern architecture.
Gartner describes this modern architecture as "open architecture with inherent centralized services or microservices, which allow for [the platform] to serve as the conduit to adjacent applications."* McKinsey & Company adds that "moving to a modular, microservice-based architecture can enable organizations to achieve greater flexibility and scalability."
A unified commerce platform needs to allow extensions at every level of the platform — the data model, services and even the user interface — without any effect on the base solution. And with the proper level of APIs and services, any custom logic can be shared to enhance experiences to best fit the needs of the people using the applications. As retail operations evolve, the goal is to quickly change core retail logic or processes without any impact or downtime, allowing a digital agenda to flourish.
Ecommerce fulfillment will cease being a differentiator in 2023 and, as hybrid shopping continues to become the standard for customer expectations, now is the time to transform your digital retail operations with the right unified commerce platform.
How Manhattan Active® Omni can help you achieve unified commerce.
Manhattan Active Omni is a first-of-its-kind, unified commerce application designed and built to enable the future of retail. Born in the cloud, Manhattan Active Omni is a suite of order management, inventory, fulfillment, customer engagement and point of sale solutions that is always current and fully extensible, ready to enable your digital initiatives.
Built on a 100% microservices architecture, the Manhattan Active Platform is a cloud-native foundation for always current, constantly adaptive operations. See what characteristics make it ideal for digital retail today, and into the future.
To learn more about the digital transformation your associates need and modern customers require:
VISIT OUR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SITE
* Source: Gartner “Moving to a modular, microservice-based architecture can enable organizations to achieve greater flexibility and scalability.” Published 2 August 2021.