Download our 2024 Trends Report to read more UNRVLD predictions for the year ahead.

Commerce is fast becoming about far more than product pages and checkouts. The modern commerce experience is intricate, bringing together a combination of systems to meet the expectations and desires of the modern consumer. If you’re ready to accept this challenge, you will unlock significant potential and reap greater commercial rewards.

How to build modern commerce success

The modern commerce experience is a different beast than before. Customers are increasingly willing to engage and transact with brands across several digital and physical channels, whilst setting their own standards on what they perceive to be a strong experience. In response, visionary businesses are moving quickly to provide the functionality to support transactions across new channels.

To date, the move to provide functionality to support this increasingly complex marketplace has been reactive, with companies piecing together digital ecosystems on the fly and employing an array of workarounds and inefficient processes to fill remaining gaps.
Omnichannel commerce goes beyond simply transacting to create a shopping experience, including:

·     The injection of storytelling through content and media

·     The building of real-time engagement through live commerce experiences

·     Leveraging the power of communities to engender trust and drive sales

According to Capital One, 73% of retail customers shop across multiple channels and merchants who use three or more channels increase customer engagement 250% more than single-channel merchants. Customers are not only seeking a richer shopping experience but also a more seamless one.

Create a consistent shopping experience

The architectures of old inhibit your ability to deliver on customer expectations. Building omnichannel commerce experiences means unifying the backend, bringing commerce and marketing technologies into an organised and flexible single architecture. It means creating a single engine to deliver the experience. To be successful, an array of technologies must work in unison, blending their respective capabilities and leveraging the same, centralised data model to create a consistent shopping experience. These include the management of content, digital assets, product information, search and merchandising, customer data platforms, order management and more.

Prediction

Throughout 2024 we expect to see more organisations following in the footsteps of early adopters, such as Nike, to create composable, API-first commerce solutions to support their expanding retail footprint. At the same time, vendors such as Shopify (with their Commerce Components offering), Commerce tools and Elasticpath, will continue to gain ground on the legacy market of SAP Hybris, Magento and others.

For many, this will seem a gargantuan task, as it requires stepping away from the worlds you have constructed, ones which hold comfort and frustration for internal stakeholders in equal measure. By designing the experiences that customers expect and anticipate, your organisation will be empowered to build content, data, processes and technology around them. By creating a future-state model, you will be able to scale and adapt to new channels as and when they emerge, without the need for workarounds and compromises.

Build iterative roadmaps that optimise continuously as you operate

The trick is in iteration. Moving your technology stack wholesale is not often feasible. Instead, pinpoint the value streams attached to your envisaged future-state model and assign values of effort and reward (ROI) to each element. Build iterative roadmaps that will allow you to optimise continuously as you operate.

At UNRVLD many of our clients are on the path towards omnichannel commerce, establishing the core foundations required and gradually evolving the solution to build out the commerce experience of tomorrow. We have experience of delivering leading commerce platforms for clients and are well-placed to advise you on the next step in your commerce journey.

Download our 2024 Trends Report to read more UNRVLD predictions for the year ahead.