The true cost of poor data: Why retailers can’t afford to look the other way
Retailers who invest in data foundations will reap the rewards of loyal customers, streamlined operations, and a stronger bottom line.
As potent a retail force as omnichannel commerce is, it can harbor a hidden weakness. While it provides a consistent customer experience regardless of online access method or in-store presence, omnichannel commerce doesn’t always reach behind the digital facade. That’s because the underlying data often resides in silos.
Unified commerce goes beyond omnichannel by removing those silos and unifying not only customer touchpoints on the front end, as omnichannel does, but also the data on backend systems behind those touchpoints.
Data from all channels gets updated in real-time – customer profile and purchase data, order data, inventory data, and pricing and promotion data. Those immediate updates can flow into financial, supply chain, and other systems that were previously fed updates only periodically.
With unified commerce benefits, rather than just a consistent look-and-feel, you have a single source of truth that can deliver a consistency in customer service that omnichannel alone can’t support. That unified data enables retailers to deliver parallel, personalized experiences whether the customer is engaging on social, in-store, or on marketplaces.
As shopper expectations grow, retailers are turning to unified commerce technologies and AI-powered marketplace tools to centralize operations, personalize journeys, and scale with agility across platforms.
Unified commerce benefits for retailers and their customers
Cloud-based unified commerce solutions also give a retailer real-time insights into what’s selling, to whom, and where, and it enables AI that can predict what’s going to sell next and much more.
The benefits of unified commerce to customers include being served up the products they’re most interested in; an immediate, accurate understanding of what’s available; and an ability to do cross-channel payments and returns.
In addition to improving customer service and the sales that flow from that, unified commerce delivers several key benefits to retailers, including:
- Real-time cross-channel inventory management
- Optimized cross-store and cross-channel fulfilment
- Instantaneous product-information adjustments across all touchpoints
- Unified price, promotion, and payments management
- Powerful reporting and forecasting capabilities based on up-to-the-minute information from all channels
Unified commerce also improves operational efficiencies by reducing redundancies across fulfillment, customer service, and marketing. Also, AI models help forecast demand, improve logistics, and enhance supply chain resiliency.
Given their longstanding emphasis on and curation of rationalized data from diverse sources, it’s no surprise that major cloud-ERP developers offer unified commerce solutions that the likes of Universal Vacations & Experiences, Nokia, and Cintas have embraced. SAP ERP systems also interface with specialized unified commerce specialists such as OneView Commerce, NewStore, DataXstream, and Mercaux.
Unified commerce + marketplace AI
Unified commerce solutions also interface with marketplace AI systems in powerful ways.
Marketplace AI helps retailers work with and better integrate sales on third-party marketplace sites hosted by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Target, and social sites such as TikTok Shop. These AI tools help retailers automate marketplace listings, optimize pricing, manage inventory, and predict demand, reducing manual effort and boosting speed to market.
Key marketplace AI capabilities for retailers on third-party marketplaces include:
- Real-time product discovery based on natural-language queries
- Personalized product suggestions based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and other intent signals
- Dynamic pricing and promotions in which AI models track competitor pricing, the retailer’s inventory levels, and customer trends to adjust prices in real-time for maximum margin or conversion
- Dynamically ranked listings based on the above
- Natural language processing and image recognition to match customer searches to relevant products.
- Automated catalog management ensure consistent product listings
- Inventory and demand forecasting to predict stock needs and geographic allocations
Working towards real benefits
Marketplace AI can and does work with omnichannel commerce. But it works better with a unified commerce strategy.
Transitioning to unified commerce requires moving to cloud-based systems, integrating legacy systems, doing away with data silos, ensuring data accuracy across channels, and then selecting scalable marketplace AI that aligns with the retailer’s needs.
That’s a serious process, but the payoffs are real in terms of efficiency, agility, visibility, and, ultimately, more sales with higher profits from happier customers.