Unified Commerce is a concept that envisions a business structure based on system integration or alignment so the entire retail operation, from the beginning of the supply chain to checkout, acts in concert.
The idea is to provide efficiency in a comprehensive shopper experience that makes selecting and purchasing goods a singular process, whether initiated in-store or online using whatever method suits the individual.
The goal is thoroughgoing customer satisfaction, but getting there requires a series of complex adjustments and even basic retooling of established systems and practices. As with the shift into true omnichannel from earlier models, when physical store and e-commerce operations were often kept largely separate, unified commerce is something of a brave new world for retailing, with no clear roadmap available. It comes with the risk that any single initiative, however well-conceived, won’t work out as planned.
Unified commerce requires retailers to rebuild not only operational processes but also basic business architecture to eliminate silos and unique dynamics. The consumer-facing element of a retail business could benefit from a higher-than-ever degree of synchronization arising from more comprehensive data capture and application, coupled with the capacity to provide a response from company resources, so that whatever preferences the consumer has, the business would accommodate and anticipate. In unified commerce, the final disposition of a product or service would occur exactly as expected, no matter how a consumer shops or wants to receive a product.
Still, unified commerce requires business refinements so elaborate, it may be fairly regarded as an ideal to be pursued without a final disposition, as consumer demand and expectations evolve with the retail innovations in service and technology. However, establishing a unified commerce goal based on present realities, market and operational, is likely to prove important as major retailers including Walmart, Target and Amazon continue to invest in systems that move their operations closer to the objective. By effectively building a unified commerce structure, retailers can position themselves to keep pace with competitive realities and customer expectations in the changing marketplace.
The investment to do so, though, will be substantial, as it requires putting together systems across the entire business structure and, in many cases, throwing out elements that won’t fit even if they’ve otherwise served their purposes satisfactorily.
As 2024 ended, Coresight Research looked ahead to the current year and concluded that a substantial proportion of retailers would invest in executing unified commerce strategies. The market researcher noted retailers ready to engage consumers with a unified commerce approach had, among their current priorities, supported seamless transition between touchpoints while employing emerging technology in consumer service and outreach.
In terms of customer engagement, Coresight noted, unified commerce can represent a refinement of earlier strategies meant to ensure in-store and virtual retail work in mutually supportive ways. Given that, today, two-thirds of U.S. consumers typically shop multiple channels consistently, and often do so while using multiple devices, commonality of experience can be critical. Consumers who are satisfied with one phase of a shopping endeavor can abandon the task if another phase goes wrong, as in consumers who browse for a product but can’t find it in the color or size they want. Ideally, in that case, a retailer with a view not only of the consumer preferences and history but of inventory and availability could offer an attractive alternative immediately. The better aligned a retailer’s systems are, the better chance the operation can salvage the sale even if the consumer’s first choice isn’t available.
Although it made note of the consumer-facing element of the strategy, Coresight also pointed to the operational requirements necessary to employ a unified commerce strategy to maximum effect, beginning with connecting inventory, order management, and customer data across all shopping channels. Retailers that don’t begin to move in that direction could find themselves lagging behind consumer expectations.
The Multitude
Unified commerce, and the consolidated operating structure underlying it, becomes more important as consumers shop more diversely. Already, apps and social media are becoming more mainstream as shopping options that are making already complex retail engagement with consumers even more toilsome.
Integration behind the scenes, to the extent that it makes purchasing clear-cut and simple across touch points, can create more impulse buying and upselling opportunities, Coresight noted. Ease of shopping across different channels is essential. However, when it comes to brick-and-mortar retail environments, the ability to apply unified commerce principles is improving, if still lagging online in responsiveness.
Retailers are using systems in stores that can regularly kick out price changes that come in accordance with market pressures, promotional schedules, the ebb and flow of consumer demand and inventory availability. Such systems can generate price tag stickers that can be readily applied to shelves in sequences that conform to store layouts and so are simple to mount going up and down aisles rather than searching through the store for each item affected. Yet, they can’t respond to changing conditions, as is the case with online retail. The physical labels take time to apply and require labor in application, which is often in short supply these days. As such, price changes need prioritization, because stores often won’t have time to make them all.
Digital shelf labels at Walmart
As it advances, unified commerce requires greater harmony, especially in high-volume retail operations. Electronic shelf labels that retailers can automatically update, along with smart carts and latest-generation self-checkout systems, represent the next phase in the development of unified commerce retailing. This not only enables instant price changes but also provides personalized recommendations and promotional offers via shop and scan devices, apps, or at checkout. Electronic shelf labels are a means of bringing physical and virtual retail that much closer in alignment. Then, unified commerce can support the incorporation of retail media, marketplaces and data services that extend retailers into new operational realms and generate untapped revenue streams. The growing retail media businesses in place today can drive incremental dollars to retailers who employ them, Coresight observed, with benefits accruing to those that can tie them into real-time shopping online and in-store.
The Build
With unified commerce being a complex, sometimes difficult subject to fully appreciate, Dave Bruno, Aptos’ director of retail industry insights, said his job entails helping retailers understand how to put technology to work in pursuit of greater customer satisfaction, accomplished efficiently, which can be considered a basic description of unified commerce, or at least an antecedent to it.
At the most basic level, Bruno said, arriving at a definition of unified commerce is difficult because people view the practice from different perspectives as the available technology and systems evolve. In that case, moving to a more aligned structure is a big job that retailers must tackle as the pieces they are trying to put together take new shapes. Aptos, for its part, has a history of helping retailers capitalize on technology and, in applying its expertise, chooses not to think about unified commerce as a technical advancement nor as a customer service function. Rather, the company views it in the context of a specific purpose.
“We try to unify the experience and the enterprise,” Bruno said.
The execution of a unified strategy can become confused because retailers and the technology vendors they employ to help them in their efforts have their own unique perspectives. Retail businesses have a variety of departments and teams responsible for functions ranging from supply chain management to social media promotion. Encouraging diverse players to rethink their work methods and adapt to new systems that may not be as familiar as their current ones is a challenge.
Bruno said Aptos recognizes that it’s tough to bring the customer experience and enterprise into a single organizational focus on the shopper.
“At the end of the day, it’s organizational alignment around a clear strategy that responds to what your unique customers expect, need, demand, desire, require,” Bruno said. “Everything else is secondary.”
Making It Work
Retailers tackling unified commerce know they need a strategy that is in place and accepted, at least conceptually, through the organization. However, they often struggle with developing an action plan that gets everyone pulling in the same direction. Bruno cautioned that consistent engagement by the top level of management and oversight is vital in ensuring the entire organization is cooperating in the purpose it has set, especially when combining parts of the organization that have enjoyed independence.
Today, Bruno said, unified commerce is aspirational in the sense that most retailers haven’t positioned their organizations from the top down to establish a comprehensive unified commerce framework that can deliver the benefits possible. However, he added, the way retail has been developing, building that structure is what will keep store operators competitive.
Bruno makes the point that retailers trying to build a unified commerce structure by focusing on their websites need to focus on the hard work of taking their widespread, granular brick-and-mortar businesses, where most retail transactions occur. What can be done with a few keystrokes online is often much more challenging to accomplish in a store or even hundreds or thousands of stores.
“I’m not saying ignore the website, obviously,” Bruno said, noting that the physical store network should be shifted towards providing and acting on data-based insights that deliver customer benefits and guide store personnel in their customer interactions. Structures that fall short can’t deliver all that unified commerce promises.
“If those associates are not engaged, informed and empowered by the technology in the palm of their hands, you have a very high risk of losing customers to other places where they are,” Bruno said.
Even interfaces and electronic outreach, including those that occur in conjunction with apps, loyalty programs and retail advertising, must support the interaction of the physical store and the customer shopping there. At the same time, Bruno warned that AI alone isn’t going to be a foolproof link between the customer and the store, and all the resources it has available, including online. AI agents can help consumers make decisions, but unified commerce requires the constant availability of all the resources a store possesses to deliver on what the customer wants in the immediate sense and, more broadly, in the proposition the store makes to the consumer who is shopping the sales floor.
The Plans
VTEX, an enterprise digital commerce platform, has been working with companies to integrate their operations and move toward unified commerce.
“At VTEX, we see unified commerce as both an experience and a digital architecture,” said Dani Jurado, the company’s executive vice president of North America. “For consumers, it means consistency across every channel from preferences, pricing and availability. For retailers, it’s operational unity. That means one platform connecting all touchpoints, inventory pools, fulfillment and order orchestration in real time.”
To help clients, VTEX has developed an infrastructure that enables brands to treat physical and digital storefronts as a single operation, even as they scale across B2B, B2C, marketplace or hybrid models.
Jurado said it’s important to note this isn’t an incremental improvement on omnichannel as it has been understood. Rather, unified commerce is grounded in an infrastructure that originated in omnichannel but surpasses the current conception in its ability to consolidate all available resources to satisfy shoppers.
Jurado noted Colgate-Palmolive and KitchenAid work with VTEX to meet the demands of buyers, “whether corporate or consumer, across regions and channels. Their architectures differ, but they share the same goal, which is building commerce systems and operational workflows that meet their brand and customer where they are, while unlocking new opportunities as their businesses grow. With an adaptable architecture built for global enterprise, growth stays connected to the core systems that power it, not just the storefronts that present it.”
The reality is that even companies that are forward-thinking and moving towards unified commerce operations still need to do a lot of heavy lifting.
“Unified commerce is still more aspiration than reality for many major retailers in North America,” Jurado said. “While progress has been made, we continue to see brands with partially connected systems that fail to support real-time decisions or seamless customer journeys. Inventory, pricing and fulfillment often remain siloed, breaking continuity and adding friction at the point of conversion.”
The good news, Jurado said, is that many retailers are migrating from legacy systems, demonstrating that store operators are no longer satisfied with tools that are only loosely connected.
VTEX in-store point of commerce
Simplification
Although moving toward unified commerce can be intimidating and require aligning a lot of moving parts, it is, in the end, a means of reducing complexity for those who follow through with the effort.
“Creating a true unified commerce method requires simplification,” Jurado said. “And that means coming to terms with some difficult decisions amongst your team, like aligning on areas that will answer how your business operates, not just what systems you’re using. Unified commerce is a discipline. It requires shared fundamental rules for inventory, pricing, promotions and fulfillment to flow across every sales channel: digital commerce, physical stores, marketplaces and your sales reps. Without that foundation, brands fall into orchestration debt, spending more time reconciling channels than growing them.”
VTEX collaborates with companies to establish rules and address questions like: Who owns pricing? Where is inventory coming from? How do returns flow? As efforts proceed, infrastructure should reflect the choices made in response.
“Unified commerce creates consistency for and between customers and staff,” Jurado said. “A shopper using WhatsApp to check product availability gets the same pricing and delivery options as someone browsing the main site or checking in-store. That consistency builds trust and accelerates conversion.”
A true unified commerce operation acts as a single synchronized system, Jurado said. “It’s not stitched-together channels that only do half the job,” he said. “That means a customer sees a product on Instagram, checks store availability online, picks it up in person, and returns it elsewhere without friction or delay.”
The trick is that as retail evolves, synchronization must adapt to more ways of doing business, some of which have not yet been foreseen.
“Unified commerce is not a finish line,” Jurado said. “It’s an operating model that evolves with the business. Every brand faces constant change: new products, new channels, new ways to engage. From WhatsApp to agentic AI delivering concierge commerce experiences, each touchpoint brings its own tradeoffs. If testing a new digital tactic takes weeks to embed, your system is failing. Agility shouldn’t come at the cost of stability or security. Flexible orchestration and real-time visibility across the operation are the only ways to maintain business relevance and enterprise success.”
On August 12, the company, via its VTEX Vision annual showcase, introduced new platform capabilities such as cross-channel fulfillment options and AI Semantic Search that interprets shopper intent beyond exact keywords to return smarter results and conjoin execution at scale without losing speed, Jurado pointed out, which can be a component in a unified commerce framework to make interactions feel consistently effortless.
VTEX AI Semantic Search
The Now Part
David Barker, president of Honeywell Productivity Solutions and Services, said unified commerce is becoming more critical to success as retailers apply new technology to coax purchasing by uniting shoppers with store features they’ll find personally appealing.
“Some retailers are even implementing smart dressing rooms and augmented reality product demos,” Barker said.
Retailers these days have a better view of how they might benefit from a more consumer-centric, better-coordinated approach to business. However, their thinking still incorporates lessons learned in the past that might no longer apply.
“Facilitating unified commerce requires a holistic view of retail processes, where every stakeholder has access to 360-degree real-time data to make smart, informed decisions and create seamless experiences,” Barker noted. “While elevating store executions with digital touchpoints is still a core component, such as locating kiosks throughout a store, retailers will need to tap into the bigger picture to maximize results as unified commerce develops.”
A crucial component of the unified commerce design is the ability to manage a constant data-gathering and response framework that encompasses the entire enterprise.
“By leveling up, unified commerce capabilities with real-time data, retailers can learn more about their customers’ evolving desires and better understand how to set their shopping experience apart, from initial product research through to checkout,” Barker pointed out. “A holistic approach can also enable improvements in areas that often go under the radar, such as workforce management, payment gateways and content management systems. To stand out in 2025 and beyond, retailers must bridge the silos of digital and physical and use real-time insights to deliver frictionless customer experience moments.”
In Play
Scott Benedict, affiliate partner at consultancy McMillan Doolittle, said retailers must keep in mind that the primary purpose of unified commerce is enhancing shopper engagement and satisfaction.
“I view technology as an enabler of this strategy, but success is rooted in a retailer’s overall focus on serving a customer wherever, whenever and however they wish to be served,” Benedict said. “Walmart is seeing success because of the investments they have made in infrastructure and its strategy of integrating functional teams like merchandising and marketing, placing products online that are available in-store for local delivery or pick up, and then leaning into its marketplace strategy both as a way to expand assortments online, but to also serve as an additional revenue stream as well as a developmental environment for small suppliers from which buyers can capture the best performers for inclusion into their core store assortment.”
Retailers need to integrate their go-to-market strategies across stores and online because doing so “is quickly becoming a fundamental approach rather than a leading-edge concept,” Benedict added.
Walmart has been conspicuous in assembling and integrating operational elements as the components of a unified commerce structure. In April, Walmart announced that it was opening what the company dubbed its next-generation supercenter in Cypress, TX. The store operates as an advanced prototype where customers see QR codes throughout the store that unlock digital tools, resources and immediate access to an expanded product assortment. Walmart reported the store demonstrated its intention to blend the best of physical and digital to create a seamless journey that makes shopping easy, fast and convenient. Walmart emphasized that the store had digital shelf labels in place across the store.
As part of the launch, John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart U.S., said the Texas supercenter is “part of a larger transformation happening across our stores as we reimagine what shopping looks like for the future.”
Walmart next-generation Texas supercenter
Although the Texas supercenter gives Walmart a chance to show off what it has accomplished in conceiving stores for the future, McMillan Doolittle’s Benedict said the retailer had been building toward what it showcased in Cypress. Walmart began working with digital shelf tags a couple of years ago in stores near its Bentonville, AR, headquarters, Benedict indicated, and it has added more stores to the program, including multiple Neighborhood Market locations.
“The only question is: What’s the timeline for getting the whole chain to convert because I got the impression that was the plan, that they were going to convert the whole Walmart chain,” Benedict said.
For a long time, a big challenge with digital shelf labels was that they are most secure if built into fixtures. Although some retailers are willing to absorb the cost for end caps and special displays, many are reluctant to make the investment required to go store-wide with a fixture conversion that would include digital shelf tags throughout.
Benedict said the Walmart digital shelf tags are contained in strips that can be secured and removed. As such, they could be not only more durable than typical hanging tags given daily wear and tear but also friendlier from a maintenance perspective versus built-in shelf tags.
Benedict said the labor savings involved through changing prices automatically, particularly with supercenters that stock 100,000 items, are significant and help balance the expense. In addition, for workers who are filling pick-up or delivery orders, the signs light up consecutively based on what’s needed to fill out the customer’s shopping list, speeding the process.
Cash Commitment
Naresh Keswani, vice president of software solutions at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, said investments by retailers in omnichannel operations have prepared them to press on to unified commerce. Still, more time and effort are required to achieve the breakthrough.
The investment question is an important one, as retailers must decide whether to invest in the technology and operational updates needed to establish a unified structure or to open a couple of more stores with the money. Investment in unified commerce-related initiatives isn’t likely to provide a quick return. Even in cases where a technology that contributes to a unified commerce strategy offers an immediate payoff, it’s only one investment among many others that might take a lot longer to produce a return.
Keswani said that, despite past investments, getting stores up to unified commerce management will come with a significant cost. The role of stores has changed as part of omnichannel development, and they have become better integrated with digital retail, but the physical retail foundation continues to require attention.
“Retailers are waking up to this,” Keswani said. (They say), ‘We’ve made all this investment. We spent all our money on digital. And it has essentially opened new revenue streams.’ But they abandoned new technology in their cash cow because technology was running. And now to put those two together, that’s creating the bottleneck.
“You can bring all these e-commerce orders, but if you don’t have in-store fulfillment, you don’t have in-store pricing, you don’t have an in-store uniform cart, there’s no way to process those orders and be able to delight the shopper,” Keswani continued. “Now they’re waking up to: ‘I need to work on the store component. I need to work on the edge component. It’s always server-based; there is no connection to the cloud. In fact, I never invested in the network infrastructure to even think about how my store communicates with the cloud.’ Now we’re seeing all those investments come through.”
As they developed e-commerce and omnichannel frameworks, Keswani said, retailers were not necessarily thinking about how to effectively tie in digital and physical commerce across the enterprise. Not only that, but the rapid development of elements such as loyalty programs and retail media as operated in stores and online creates even more integration issues in the unified commerce scheme of things. Under the circumstances, retailers have a lot of work to do in bringing brick-and-mortar operations into the unified commerce scheme of things.
“You go to the store, and you recognize the complexity of downtime, ability to connect outside, payments and variety of payments you have to take in store, peripherals that are in the store, connection to other systems that are in part of the store, taking a check,” Keswani said. “All that is so complex that people realized you just can’t take what you built in e-commerce and put it in a store. You still must build a unified vision of bringing it together.”
Yet, retailers have gotten closer to the fulfillment of one promise that is included with unified commerce, as developments at Walmart suggest. More retailers are in the position to implement dynamic pricing, he said. The subject of dynamic pricing can be tricky, and a general acknowledgment that implementation is problematic, as, to many consumers, it may seem like a bait-and-switch strategy.
Because of that, factors such as transparency are important. Still, the ability to efficiently adjust prices of produce or even holiday gift items, for example, as they move from vendor to checkout, is a positive application of a unified commerce strategy. Rather than dumping products into half-price bins or after-Christmas closeouts, retailers can adjust prices so that those products sell before they become leftovers. Although dynamic pricing already has a foothold at retail, in unified commerce, with supply chain, inventory and the various forms of consumer engagement available all tied together with consumer behavior data, retailers have a better chance to appropriately price products as shopping trends become evident. Promotions on slow-moving goods developed with constantly updating shopper data can direct outreach to consumers most likely to respond and at a price they and the retailer find acceptable.
The Long View
More retailers have a better sense of what’s needed to enjoy the benefits expected with unified commerce and feel a greater urgency to push through to an end game where they start to enjoy the full range of rewards. From the opposite view, failure to make the effort could result in disappointment among consumers who anticipate and even insist on better experiences.
“Retailers are getting aggressive,” Keswani said, “because they’re able to find not only the opportunities, and because here’s the perfect storm: We have now this new breed of shoppers who are looking for these delightful experiences.”
Under the circumstances, unified commerce, with a singular set of systems and processes, can meet expectations not just because shopping and receiving products is smoother but also because the capture and application of consumer behavior is an elemental part of the system. Retail has evolved to satisfy elevated consumer expectations. The next step is to anticipate them.
Unified commerce includes the promise that retailers can guide consumers using accumulated data, wherever they are shopping, in a way that is specific to their preferences, even when they don’t know what that might be. Data-based suggestions arising from past behavior in stores, online or on social media connect shoppers with products that satisfy their needs even if they’ve never heard of them.
Toshiba, a producer of shelf checkout stands and other in-store technology, is one of the companies available to help retailers advance unified commerce goals as it continues to refine and develop its technology. Self-checkout systems, in a unified commerce environment, can build on features initially developed to streamline the payment process. They can reduce shrinkage, glean more information about shopper behavior and link to loyalty programs and historical data to offer rewards, promotions, discounts, and deals linked with retail advertising that will appear in an app for future use.
However, Keswani cautioned that a lot of the hardware operating in stores has been purchased well in the past, at least in terms of technology, and even as far back as the 1990s. Hardware, including in-store servers and other support equipment, might have served well as retailers turned to omnichannel operations. They may need to be upgraded to meet the demands of unified commerce in the cloud, which can handle the new demands on systems and communications required.
Toshiba Self-Checkout System
Getting on Board
Retailers also need to reconsider how long they incorporate the evolving capabilities associated with AI into their unified commerce strategies. AI may not be the answer to every unified commerce challenge, but its ongoing influence is inevitable. Already, AI is accelerating Toshiba’s product development, a significant shift from the past when the technology was a monolithic entity that helped build omnichannel operations.
“The way we develop technology is radically changing,” Keswani said. “I would say in the last six months, that’s completely changed with what we can do with AI. We’re building AI-based development games. We’ve got our Elara commerce platform: That is essentially our view of unified commerce. The feature functions that we used to build in the monolith used to take us three to five months, and, in our microservices platform, used to take us four to six weeks, are now taking us days.”
Keswani’s outlook on technology takes the form of a hockey stick that proceeds on a level, then shoots up at a steep angle, led by companies that are determined to put emerging, tech-based capabilities into effect. He compares what’s happening with unified commerce today to the popularization first of mobile phones, then of smartphones, which led to a cascade of innovation at retail and continues to do so.
With its comprehensive capabilities, unified commerce might be a plus for retailers when it comes to customers and employees. As they face as much as 60% attrition and the constant need to train new employees, mostly under 45 years of age, retailers face a workforce that has a different way of doing things, having come of age with computer technology, the Internet, and smartphones. Retailers must come to grips with that reality, Keswani said, and unified commerce capabilities can help in the workplace.
“I give them an experience, which is very different from what they experience on their phone,” he said. “If I’m going to ask them to go click all these buttons and remember all these things and go pick up a book and look for a UPC. Forget about it. Sometimes I need to delight my associates. I need to reduce my training time from 60 hours to four hours. That alone is going to pay for the technology.”
Walmart offers a wide range of smartphones to help customers find products and access services, simplifying daily tasks like scheduling, timekeeping and work assignments.
Unified commerce can enhance functions across an enterprise, but it necessitates ongoing and sometimes costly commitment to reap benefits in an approach to retailers that will continue to evolve, requiring new adaptations and presenting fresh opportunities.
