Unified commerce is a retailing strategy combining multiple systems for a single view of customers, products, and profits. The concept has been around for a decade, initially for small and mid-sized retailers to compete with enterprises.
It’s now one of ecommerce’s most promising trends, with Shopify, BigCommerce, and a slew of others offering solutions.
Unified Commerce
Unified commerce merges sales, inventory, and fulfillment software across all channels into a shared, real-time interface for both shoppers and employees, comprising three concepts:
- Composable architecture,
- Experience first,
- Unity across touchpoints.
Composable architecture
Composable architecture (composable commerce) refers to a technology stack of interchangeable components connected via application programming interfaces.
“Composable” means any part of the stack — checkout, product search, order management — is replaceable without breaking everything else.
Combined, the various applications are modular and scalable.
Experience first
Shopify and the research firm Gartner emphasize that unified commerce is “experience-first” or “experience-led,” meaning how a customer, employee, or business interacts with systems is key for building the stack.
For a shopper, “experience first” might dictate a system to browse for a product on Instagram, add it to a social commerce cart, purchase it several hours later via the merchant’s website, and pick it up in-store — all without losing context.
Employees have similar experiences. A support rep chatting with a customer via direct messages on X can access her shopping history in any channel and easily check on orders, in-store returns, or even newsletter subscriptions.
Likewise, the merchant’s entire marketing team benefits from the experience-first approach. The composable stack connects all customer touchpoints to a marketing attribution system, providing data for multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modeling.
Unity
In unified commerce, all systems share a single source of truth — for inventory, orders, pricing, customer data, content distribution, and more.
The front-end shopper-facing systems are consistent and connect across:
- Online storefronts,
- Content marketing,
- Brick-and-mortar locations,
- Mobile apps,
- Social media platforms,
- Social commerce integrations,
- Marketplaces,
- Customer service channels.
The company’s back-end systems are tightly integrated for real-time visibility and coordination.
Unified means real-time, fully integrated, and seamless across the board.
Advantage Enterprise?
Ironically, unified commerce — conceived to help SMBs — now attracts enterprise companies.
Delivering a seamless, real-time experience across every customer touchpoint and back-end system is technically complex and resource-intensive. Large retailers are more likely to have the capital, engineering staff, and operational maturity to unify legacy systems, integrate emerging channels, and invest in the modular components.
Moreover, unified commerce is more than accessing a few APIs. It means rethinking how systems are constructed, how employees interact with the tools, and how customer data flows securely and consistently through the business.
Thus, while unified commerce via Shopify or BigCommerce could help SMBs, big stores seem to have the advantage.
The Real Test
Despite its promise, the profit from unified commerce will decide success or failure.
Take the hypothetical shopper who begins her buying journey on Instagram only to finish with a buy-online, pick-up in-store purchase from the retailer’s website.
Does the profit from integrating social media with an ecommerce platform justify the investment? Increased conversion rates, reduced returns, better inventory turnover, and higher customer lifetime value — those are the metrics that matter.