Unified Commerce
for Smart Consumer & Smart Retail Enterprise
Technology within the retail space has primarily served to ensure transactional moments were quick and efficient. Now, retailers have an unprecedented opportunity to go a step further and leverage digital technologies to elevate the customer experience in more meaningful ways. From creating new products to delivering specialized campaigns, machine learning, analytics and other technologies are empowering brands and retailers to understand their shoppers better and deliver differentiated 1:1 experiences.
As customers’ expectations for best-in-class shopping increase thanks to the immediacy and personalized relationships crafted by retail upstarts and e-commerce giants, data-led intelligence are essential to thrive in this competitive landscape.
Technology is at the very heart of the future of retail. And, as this technology continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible, shoppers’ expectations rise in tandem. They want retailers to deliver the kind of ground-breaking, phygital and personalized experiences that make them say wow.
Smart Consumer
Today’s shoppers prioritize exceptional customer experience. They’re willing to provide their data to companies, but expect a higher quality experience in return — in exchange of benefits such as automatic credits for coupons and loyalty points, access to exclusive deals, the ability to gain points and rewards or special offers for items that interest them. For retailers and their brands, this means delivering on the promise of personalization, expert service, always-available inventory and seamless cross-channel shopping. By enabling differentiated shopping journeys, customers can also feel that their relationships with brand and retailers is authentic.
Key Expectations
- Expect personalization at every stage — consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.
- Knowledgeable staff on-Hand for service and support — being able to engage with knowledgeable store associates is “important” or “very important.”
- Right product in stock. Gen Z’ers surveyed said a wide choice of products was the most important factor when choosing where to shop.
Smart Retail Enterprise
Know Your Customers
Personalized Outreach- Utilize powerful AI-ML algorithms to learn a consumer’s behavior and preferences
Anticipatory Support- proactive service using AI to better track and respond to shopper behavior and purchasing habits, alongside broader contextual cues moving towards just-in-time assistance and predictive care
Empower Employees
Assisted Service: a frontline workforce that is knowledgeable and passionate about products and empowered to solve any problem. New platforms are bringing these details to the forefront of retail interactions, enabling associates to recognize their customers and deliver personalized service and advice to improve the sales or service experience.
Dynamic Decisions
To help employees better respond to immediate issues or improve the store operations with a forward-looking view, companies are equipping their employees with AI-enabled tools that provide in-the-moment access to key information and analytics and streamline communications between staff.
Enable an intelligent supply chain
Cloud Synthesis: Data-driven communication channels can help optimize fast and responsive communication between factories, warehouses, stores and other supply chain elements, sharing key information between partners through cloud infrastructure.
Responsive Merchandising
Successful brands and retailers are differentiating themselves with data-led initiatives that enable them to quickly adapt or even anticipate shifts to be first to market with new products inspired by local purchase patterns to better serve the needs of their customers.
Synced CRM
As personalization and recognition across channels becomes a greater expectation among shoppers, retailers, and mall operators are creating systems that ‘log’ customers into physical stores to trigger recommendations and in-store activations, and inform assistants to deliver personalized service, all while simultaneously syncing customer experiences both on- and offline.
Data-Led R&D Organizations are deriving insights from in-store behavior, product interactions, loyalty engagement, and shopper feedback to identify areas for improvement. This information is then translated into actionable strategies that can inform decisions around merchandising, rewards programs, and technology investment to continually refine the front-end experience and ensure customer needs are always top of mind.
Cashier-less Stores
The idea of queue-busting cashier-less stores has been given extra impetus by social distancing measures imposed on the back of COVID-19. One survey looking at shifts in shopping habits due to the pandemic found that 87 percent of customers would likely choose stores with contactless or self-checkout options.
The ability for customers to simply walk out of the store with their items being scanned automatically and the total debited from their account will likely soon become widespread. Amazon originally pioneered this approach through the Just Walk Out system, put into practice through Amazon Go stores.
What is Unified Commerce
Unified Commerce is when all sales channels exchange product, inventory, order, and customer data in real-time. With one truth and full transparency across all touchpoints, you can provide a unified experience for customers regardless of channel.
Key Capabilities
- Point of Sale
- Real-time Inventory Management
- Localization and Internationalization
- e-commerce with m-commerce support
- Warehouse and Vendor Management
- Reporting, KPI tracking, Performance analysis, Decision support analytics
- Customer Relationship Management
- Finance Management
- Integrations between different platforms
The Evolution — Omni Channel to Unified Commerce
Omni-channel is an experience that a customer always wants, a unified commerce solution is an answer and the path to provide the omnichannel experience. Unified commerce works for the most important asset of any business, which is the customer, and all the services it offers are absolutely customer concentric.
Key Components of Unified Commerce
Unified commerce solution comprises of three components, each addressing a section of business operation.
1. Point of Sale
2. Digital Commerce system
3. ERP Integration
1. Point of Sale
A PoS system provides the businesses to perform sales operations with the end consumer, i.e. a place where a customer makes a payment for products or services in a store.
It is expected to do
- Checkout and Billing
- Opening and Closing Operations
- Workforce Management
- User Role & Access and security
- Mobile POS, Self-Checkout
- Pricing and Promotions
- Inventory Management
- Hardware Integration
- Reports and Dashboards
- Audit and Administration
2. E-Commerce
An e-commerce system provides an online shopping experience where customers can browse and buy products with convenient payment options
It is expected to do
- Integrate with multiple POS and System of Truth Backoffice
- Integrate to inventory from a primary source and additional sources as required
- Order processing and fulfillment
- Point-and-click rules for messaging (In Stock, Low Stock, Out of Stock, Backorder) and thresholds
- Out of stock items have a “Waitlist” feature where a user can subscribe to receive an email when an item is back in stock
- Calculations — tax, freight, etc
- Shipping and Payments
3. ERP Integration
Integrate with merchandising (promotions, upsell, social, etc) operations, inventory, and finance systems and support multiple brands / multiple stores.
It is expected to do
- Master Data Management
- Procurement Operations
- Replenishment control
- BI & Reporting
- Workforce Management
- Tax and Policies inclusion
- Payroll Processing
- Finance Management
- Order Management
- Warehouse Management
- AI-ML capabilities
OSI’s own One POS integrated with Miva, Oracle and E3 Partnerships enable us to rapidly deploy unified commerce solutions for a faster go-to-market
Unified Commerce — Architecture Approach
We recommend microservices-based architecture design
Key characteristics of the unified commerce solution
- Scalability
- High Availability
- Operational Simplicity
- Messaging Framework
- Decouple core services
- Serverless
- Data Lake
Conclusion
OSI Unified Commerce Solution with Partners — E3 Point of Sale | Miva eCommerce Platform | OSI One POS | Boomi Integration Services
OSI can provide you with everything you need in a complete solution
- Enabling seamless customer experiences across all touchpoints.
- Customer information flows across all applications.
- Customers presented with unified pricing and promotions in all touchpoints.
- Open architecture that allows for POS to serve as the anchor to all applications.
- Deployment options to suit your business.
- Application development that supports the same code across devices, improving speed to market and reducing costs.
- Integrated Order Management solution.
- Unified data for reporting and analysis.
- Partnerships with hardware providers, to assist you in determining the optimal configuration.
- Unmatched service and support.
Content provided in this blog is for educational purposes only. Any similarity with what you read before is purely coincidental. All trademarks, service marks, and company names used are the property of their respective owners. Images courtesy: stock.adobe.com.
