How You Can Complete Your Customer Profiles with Unified Commerce

1. What is Unified Commerce?
2. These advantages and opportunities are offered by Unified Commerce
3. How to implement Unified Commerce
4. How companies use Unified Commerce
5. Unified Commerce provides you with Shopper Insights as a basis for your marketing decisions

Perhaps you know this yourself: You just bought a pair of sneakers in the store and then you keep getting ads for the same model from the associated online store. On the one hand, this is annoying - after all, you're already wearing the shoes - and on the other hand, the store is wasting valuable advertising budget that could have been used much better elsewhere.

What helps? Unified Commerce. With the right software, you can skillfully respond to consumer trends and the changing needs of your customers - and use your advertising budgets effectively. Because: according to Statistisches Bundesamt, about 82 percent of Germans aged 16 and over shop online. At the same time, however, people are looking forward to shopping experiences in real life. So if you cleverly link your sales channels and make use of important data, you can offer your customers a thoroughly successful Customer Journey and thus stand out from the competition.

We'll explain in detail what Unified Commerce is and how you can get more out of your business with this approach.

What is Unified Commerce?

E-commerce and offline retail can go hand in hand. Many retailers have recognized this and offer their customers multiple ways to shop with them using the multichannel approach. You can easily order a t-shirt from the store in the city center to your home in the associated online shop or inform yourself about the range of products on the go. However, the different sales channels work separately from each other. So if there are simultaneous sales via the online shop and the store, retailers lack a unified view of important data such as inventory levels. In addition, the lack of linking of the channels - and therefore of customer data - complicates processes such as returning online orders to the store, which in turn has a negative impact on the shopping experience of the customers.

To make things easier, multichannel became omnichannel: According to the omnichannel principle, the different distribution channels interact with each other. This allows for almost seamless sales of goods via your own online shop, marketplaces, social media or in the store. Click-and-collect or "Buy now, pay later" (BNPL) are no longer a problem. Sounds good, but there's a catch: although the sales channels are connected with each other in the omnichannel approach, they must be managed separately. This means a lot of effort and many different insights. This is where Unified Commerce comes into play.

With Unified Commerce, you can keep track of all data using a platform. This approach connects your omnichannel systems and is a superior interface for interacting with your customers. All payments are processed on one platform and provide an important basis for data-driven decisions thanks to a single backend. The payment data of your buyers help you identify them across channels and respond specifically to their needs at the different touchpoints of the customer journey. In this way, thanks to Unified Commerce, you no longer operate in silos and can use advertising budgets effectively.

These advantages and opportunities are offered by Unified Commerce

By linking your sales channels, you offer your customers the best possible shopping experiences. This in turn increases customer loyalty to your brand or your business. Because an optimal customer experience has a great influence on whether customers shop with you and especially whether they come back. Unified Commerce helps you improve this customer experience.

Payment data provide information about how much money your customers spend with you, how often and via which end device they shop with you, or which channels they prefer to use. Based on these real-time data, which are centrally available, Unified Commerce allows you to create individual profiles of your customers and segment them. Their evaluation in turn provides you with important insights about values such as the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). This allows you to respond more directly to the needs of your customers, improve your advertising measures thanks to targeted targeting, and avoid unnecessary ad waste.

Furthermore, with the help of Unified Commerce you can

• recognize returning customers cross-channel and thus offer them a more personal shopping experience.
• identify loyal customers and bind them even more closely to your brand with payment-based loyalty programs.
• identify less loyal customers, such as refund fraudsters, and block them.
• Identify churn-endangered customers and continue to convince them of your brand through targeted measures.
• identify popular products and manage your inventories.
• improve your upselling measures and thus increase your sales by presenting your customers with items in ads, for example, that would fit well with their already purchased products.
• Make business processes and other procedures easier, as they all take place bundled in one place.
• Open new channels or locations quickly and implement new technologies, as a superior platform links everything together through integration.

Customers want a comprehensive shopping experience. Being able to return an item purchased online to the store may sound banal. However, a study by the financial technology platform Adyen found that 45 percent of the surveyed end customers would be more loyal to retailers who offer this service. At the same time, only 19 percent of German companies offer such a service. Potential that can be easily exploited by using a Unified Commerce solution.

How to implement Unified Commerce

Running a business across multiple channels is no easy job. The entry with the multichannel approach seems tempting at first. However, if each sales channel cooks its own soup, important growth opportunities and insights into the needs of their customers are missed - and in case of doubt, nine percent more business performance is gambled away. According to Adyen's study, the use of Unified Commerce brings this in addition to much easier management of your payment transactions.

Payment experiences tailored to your customers

The financial technology provider Adyen, for example, allows you to link payment data and transactions from all channels. This way, you can directly create 360-degree profiles of your customers in the platform and receive important shopper insights. These insights in turn are a good basis for your marketing strategies. Because they help you reach your customers on the channels they are on.

In addition to these important shopper insights about spending or preferred payment methods of your customers, Adyen's all-in-one platform enables a particularly convenient and customer-tailored payment experience. Let them, for example

• order via your app and pick up the goods in the store.
• shop in the store and deliver the goods to their home.
• pay at the self-service terminal and cash in loyalty bonuses.

Reward loyal customers better with Unified Commerce

Especially loyalty programs are a great tool to bind your customers closer to you and reward them for their loyalty. Often, however, they are associated with lengthy registration forms, which represent a hurdle for many customers. Once the loyalty card is available, it must be shown every time you make a payment. Surely you have also been annoyed by the question about your bonus card or by the longer waiting time at the cash register because others in the line in front of you had to dig out their cards first. Unified Commerce platforms link payment data directly with the corresponding profiles of your buyers. So you can skip annoying intermediate steps, recognize loyal customers even retrospectively and analyze their buying behavior.

This is achieved by linking your Shop System and your Cash register system with Adyen and accepting online payments. Integrations are possible via an API interface or one of the existing plugins for systems like Magento and Shopware. With a single integration, you get an overview of everything that is important - and all on one platform.

How companies use Unified Commerce

Depending on the business model and sales channels, the Unified Commerce approach offers different opportunities for you and your business. Whether pure e-commerce with an online shop and additional sales on marketplaces or owner-managed business with an attached online shop. And even restaurant owners and hoteliers can make everyday life easier with Unified Commerce: Franchise businesses like Domino's, for example, keep an overview of all stores and the respective payments with Adyen. This way, franchisees can see at a glance via which channels sales were generated and don't have to work their way through many different tools and reportings.

And the glasses manufacturer Ace&Tate also uses Unified Commerce and has firmly linked the online shop and physical stores. So the purchase process can take place across all channels: Order glasses online, pick them up in the store and pay there is no problem. The receipt comes by email.

Unified Commerce provides you with Shopper Insights as a basis for your marketing decisions

The customer journey has long ceased to be linear. So your sales channels should not be running next to each other in separate silos. Instead, you should bundle them into a uniform shopping experience for your customers. Unified Commerce can help you with this and let you draw important conclusions from the behavior of your customers: Who are they really? How do they shop? Which products do they prefer? The insights provide payment data that is linked across all channels. Because: while you can easily identify your buyers in e-commerce by their email addresses or usernames, these possibilities are often lacking in stationary retail.

According to Adyen's study, 47 percent of surveyed retailers said that Unified Commerce has improved their customer experiences. Connectivity has become a central part of the customer journey. Anyone who starts their purchase online is likely to be particularly pleased to be able to complete it seamlessly in the store. And anyone who is also rewarded for their loyalty without having to search for a paper stamp card first, is doubly happy in the end.

Once properly set up, Unified Commerce solutions offer great opportunities for the growth of your business. On OMR Reviews, we also give you further Tips to improve your customer experience. So what are you waiting for?