By Retail Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
Unified commerce is an industry buzzword used to describe efforts by retailers to create a consistent shopping experience across channels, from brick and mortar to e-commerce. It also encompasses the integration of back- and front-end operations, such as inventory management, merchandise planning, and payment solutions, into a single seamless platform. Part and parcel of these efforts is ensuring the benefits of new technological capabilities are spread evenly across an organization.
The evolution of unified commerce: A number of buzzwords have come along over the past three decades to describe more or less the same process. Unified commerce specifically emerged in the late 2000s and gained prominence in 2024 as a prominent theme of NRF’s Big Show. While the concept retains its power today—with one recent survey finding that 95% of retailers say unified commerce was “important” or “extremely important” to their success and profitability—newer labels describing similar ideas, such as “adaptive retail,” have gained adoption with major retailers.
Unified commerce in context: “Unified commerce is not just about selling across channels. It’s about using the same platform with the same technological capabilities across platforms, such that a customer could, for example, maintain the same shopping cart when they’re shopping across e-commerce sites and social media platforms.”
