Mar 25, 2016

Luxury Daily: Unified commerce is Holy Grail most retailers are still seeking

While 85 percent of retailers consider unified commerce a top priority, most are not making enough of an effort in upgrading their infrastructure to achieve a fully seamless shopping experience.

According to a new report from Boston Retail Partners, retailers have attempted to reformat their outdated systems to accommodate cross-channel capabilities, leaving many with “faux omnichannel.” As the consumer comes to expect a uniform service across channels, retailers are at risk of losing clientele if they do not implement a more holistic system.

“There are several factors that have made ‘faux’ omnichannel a reality,” said Ken Morris, principal at Boston Retail Partners.

“First, the accelerated and elevated customer expectations for a seamless experience has caused retailers to scramble to get omnichannel services in place as fast as possible,” he said. “Second, retailers’ legacy systems were not designed to deal with the complex cross-channel visibility and access to data that is needed to support a seamless customer experience.

“Third, many retailers have been focused on other priorities lately, like payment security, and haven’t invested the resources to effectively develop a unified commerce platform. And lastly, retailers have made very significant investments in hardware, software and services to support omnichannel over time and they cannot simply write-off that investment but need to make the transition as investment dollars permit.”

The full Luxury Daily article can be found here.