The ongoing economic uncertainty is creating several challenges for retailers, making consumers more frugal. To remain resilient through economic challenges and maximize sales, retailers must stay prepared to weather any anticipated slumps. This requires the ability to analyze trends and shoppers’ habits on a frequent basis, staying up to date while more accurately planning for the future.
Retailers need to not only reinvent their strategy to meet consumer expectations, but have to reconcile and implement new technology to meet the demands of unified commerce. Here are steps they can take to create a roadmap for connecting legacy and new technology that drives an effective unified commerce approach.
Unified commerce, unlike omnichannel, provides retailers with global reach in any market; a single version of the truth for scenarios like sourcing and returns; and control over hidden costs like shipping enablement that have crippled margins and ceded far too much ground to the likes of Amazon. See how unified commerce delivers on the promise of omnichannel.
In a recent study from Forrester Consulting and commissioned by NetSuite, midmarket business sellers say their next ecommerce investment will be a unified commerce single-stack solution for their ecommerce and back-end systems. Respondents cited better customer experience, improved costs savings and the agility to remain competitive as top reasons for migrating customers to their ecommerce channel. See what other results were found in this study.
Creating a unified customer experience across channels through a shared repository of store and ecommerce data, as well as striking a balance on its ecommerce site between sales and branding, is a lot of the focus these days at Steve Madden. See what Mark Friedman, president of ecommerce at the apparel retailer, will cover in his June 9 keynote at IRCE.
A new report from Kibo, the e-tailing group and Multichannel Merchant shows how leading omnichannel retailers are performing with buy online, pickup in store. According to the study, retailers can no longer wait on the sidelines to adopt this functionality. See what other insights the report brings to light.