Unify Your Retail Operations: Experience the Power of Unified Commerce

Keeping up with today's shopper means being everywhere at once, and it’s only getting harder. 

With each year, customers have more and more avenues through which to find your store. 

Ecommerce as a whole has taken note, beginning with multichannel commerce, or selling across channels. Next came omnichannel commerce, which laid the framework for consistent messaging and branded experiences across channels. 

But what about behind the scenes — where various analytics tools, inventory management systems, and beyond all have to communicate with one another to both give brands transparency into their businesses and meet customer expectations? This has been a continuous struggle. Today, unified is commerce offering a modern way to deliver the multichannel, seamless experience shoppers want, while uniting all those crucial behind-the-scenes tools.

First, let’s break down how it is from omnichannel commerce?

What is unified commerce?

Unified commerce connects everything: your sales channels and your backend operations, all on a single platform.

Think of a unified commerce platform as the brain for your business. Every customer interaction, product detail, order fulfillment tool, and so on — synced up in the same brain.

By having all your systems on the same backend platform, you have access to real-time data that’s all in the same place. No fussing with integrations, no worrying about delays or inaccuracies, and no struggles with one platform communicating with another.

This allows you to make more informed decisions, react quicker, pull from customer insights and improve your efforts, and better serve your customers while utilizing your resources to the fullest.

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Platform Overview

Unified commerce vs. omnichannel commerce

On the surface, unified commerce might sound like omnichannel commerce. While both entail a more unified experience, the difference is where that experience falls: the front or backend.

Omnichannel: Connecting customer touchpoints.

Omnichannel focuses on the frontend experience, with the goal of delivering a consistent experience across any number of channels where your brand lives — social media, your website, marketplaces, in-app, in-store and beyond.

Successful omnichannel commerce also means giving your customers a way to purchase from you wherever they encounter your brand, whether it’s social media or your site or anything in between.

While omnichannel commerce presents a consistent frontend experience and customer journey, the backend systems are often separate. For example, POS (Point-of-sale systems), customer relationship management (CRM), and inventory platforms typically share data in batches at specific intervals, sometimes causing delays, creating silos and inconsistencies that impact both employees and customers.

What’s this look like in the real world?

The above delays can easily result in customers ordering something online, arriving to pick it up, and learning it’s actually out of stock. For those exclusively online, the same stock inaccuracies can turn into lengthy shipping delays, canceled orders, and customers that are sure to never return.

Unified commerce: Integrating systems and data.

Unlike omnichannel commerce, unified commerce connects your systems on the backend, providing a centralized data platform. But, it also factors in the frontend treatment of omnichannel.

With unified commerce, your systems communicate in real time, meaning:

• Your POS talks to your inventory system

• Inventory immediately updates on your site

• Your CRM tracks every purchase online or in-store, updating accordingly

Without data silos, you have a single source of truth. This decreases the chances of someone buying an item that’s out of stock, enables you to forecast demand for items, and more.

Why it matters for customers.

Despite providing a cohesive frontend experience, the omnichannel approach leaves backend systems disconnected. This can negatively impact customers, resulting in:

• Syncing issues between systems

• Inaccurate information or data

• Delays in inventory updates, resulting in ordering issues and out-of-stock items

On the other hand, unified commerce connects your various systems on the backend. This has a positive impact on the customer experience, providing real-time data syncing, which allows you to offer things like:

• Buy online with in-store returns

• Buy Online, Pick Up in Store (BOPIS)

• Real-time customer loyalty rewards

• Real-time inventory and product availability

This list is by no means comprehensive. What’s important is that implementing a unified commerce approach creates a ripple effect that benefits both you and your customers in countless, oft-surprising ways.

Technology stack requirements.

Unified commerce doesn’t happen with the snapping of your fingers. It requires a modern architecture that supports broad integrations.

In reality, this looks like:

• API-first platforms that make integrations smooth and scalable

• Composable architecture that allows you to mix and match best-in-class tools

• Systems designed for collaboration, not isolation

The end result?

A flexible, future-proof foundation that can grow with your business.

Why unified commerce matters now

Today’s customers expect rapid shipping, personalized experiences, and consistency across channels. These things are now table stakes. However, it’s clear that with technology evolving quickly, new expectations will follow.

The unified architectural framework provided by unified commerce can help you meet these emerging trends, and several other modern ecommerce necessities.

Syncing required for multiple tools.

You likely have a number of ecommerce tools powering various functions, from customer support to payment processing to order management and so on.

These tools all input and output data, and when they don’t sync up, both with one another and your ecommerce platform, you run into major issues:

• Order errors: Items show as available but are out of stock

• Inconsistent pricing: Different prices across channels create confusion and mistrust

• Manual data entry: Precious time spent and more chances for errors

• Poor decision making: Incomplete data leaves you operating with an incomplete picture

The above list could go on forever. As technology advances and newer tools become available, properly synced data will only grow in importance.

Real-time data for real-time decisions.

In unified systems, every data point updates instantly — sales, inventory, fulfillment, and customer insights.

This data empowers real-time decision making, and:

• Adjusting pricing dynamically based on live demand

• Reallocating inventory between locations

• Delivering personalized product recommendations, combining online and in-store behavior.

This agility helps businesses forecast more accurately, respond faster, and stay ahead of shifting trends.

With a unified system in place, you’re able to gain a competitive edge over those that haven't made the switch yet.

Meeting customer expectations across channels.

The same digital nature of ecommerce that allows for rapid growth and changes, comes with similarly growing and changing customer expectations.

While some changes are industry specific, many sweeping shifts in customer expectations are industry agnostic, meaning you can’t ignore them.

There are numerous demands unified commerce can help you meet, from shifts in where people shop to a demand for assisted shopping:

• 71% of online retail orders were made via smartphone by the end of 2025

• Social commerce already makes up 15.2% of ecommerce sales

• 70% of shoppers want help from AI-powered shopping tools

Customer expectations will always shift. What works today may not work next year or the year after.

No matter what, a unified approach provides a foundation on which you can build long-term scalability and agility, letting you meet whatever expectations get thrown your way.

Agentic AI readiness.

Agentic AI-powered engines, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, can quickly surface responses to user inquiries. On top of this, agentic AI can recommend products for users, and even complete the purchasing process.

Already, 38% of consumers have used agentic AI to purchase products, while 73% use it as their primary means of researching products. 

It could be your products agentic AI recommends, but only if it has consistent data to pull from. With unified commerce in place, your data is housed in one location, consistent, and easy to update and distribute across marketplaces.

In other words — embracing unified commerce means being agentic ready.

“As channels and touchpoints proliferate, with combinations of human and non-human buyers, things might start to get complicated. Visibility into what’s happening is really important, and the businesses investing in enhancing, augmenting, and cleaning up their data right now are poised to do unified commerce well.”

-Doug Hollinger, Chief Strategy Officer at Commerce

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The business benefits of unified commerce

Unified commerce does more than unite systems on the backend. It provides a number of benefits that can have an impact across your business, while helping you deliver a better customer experience.

Streamlined inventory and fulfillment.

Inventory management is a crucial element of ecommerce, especially as your business scales and you list in additional marketplaces.

Without a unified approach, your inventory systems can lag behind your ecommerce platform, and any in-store POS systems you may have. This can result in selling something you don’t have, while making it nearly impossible to forecast demand.

Unified ecommerce solves this disconnect, allowing your inventory system to quickly sync with your other systems, providing:

• Real-time view of your inventory across all locations

• Data required to forecast product demand

• Data for automating workflows and streamlining order fulfillment

• Shop-from-store, BOPIS, and curbside pickup

• Agentic AI with the up-to-date inventory data it needs for recommendations

With unified inventory data, you can finally take out the guesswork behind ordering products, and make overselling a thing of the past.

Consistent cross-channel branding and personalization.

Consistent messaging across channels is crucial for both the customer experience, and your brand’s reputation. Meanwhile, 64% of consumers say personalization is “important.”

A unified approach helps you build a single source of truth. Equipped with this, you can more easily:

• Automate product messaging across channels using a product information management system (PIM)

• Deliver personalized communications that pull from customer history and habits

• Personalize ecommerce marketing efforts across every channel

• Automate branding updates across sites with content management systems

Remember: A unified approach doesn’t mean neglecting the multichannel strategy associated with omnichannel. You still want consistent branding across every channel, and for every engagement to feel as personalized as possible.

Operational efficiency gains.

You can’t strive for operational efficiency gains if you don’t have a benchmark. By unifying your systems on the backend, you’re gaining access to data that shows you where you’re at, which empowers you to go further.

Unified commerce tears down data silos, making it easier for teams to collaborate, sales teams more effective with up-to-date information, and decision making more effective and grounded in current fact.

Lower IT demands.

When you’re dealing with countless integrations and custom application programming interfaces (APIs), you’re more likely to have outages and costly IT demands.

Unified commerce reduces IT overhead, minimizes manual data reconciliation, and automates workflows across departments.

Stronger customer retention and loyalty.

Sixty percent of customer service agents point to customer data challenges as a source of poor customer experiences. And all it takes is one bad experience for more than 50% of customers to turn to a competitor.

Unified commerce makes it easier to deliver a personalized, accessible experience. With this integration comes the ability to offer loyalty programs, maintain accurate inventory, and ensure shopping experiences are as smooth as possible.

Unified commerce does more than just improve transactions. It deepens relationships.

Essential technology for a unified commerce strategy

Unified commerce requires the right platform and connectors to unite your systems on the backend, otherwise things won’t communicate properly.

The following pieces of technology and integrations are essential to making this happen.

API-first commerce platforms.

An API acts as a connector between two systems or tools, allowing them to communicate back and forth. Naturally, they’re crucial to the united approach of unified commerce.

With an API-first ecommerce platform you can count on a more seamless integration process when adding other tools or functionalities into your stack.

Take BigCommerce, for example, which can easily connect your POS, ERP, and CRM without complex workarounds.

BigCommerce also allows you to take full advantage of other ecommerce APIs, making it possible to scale and meet customer expectations as they shift.

Unified POS and ERP systems.

Your POS and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems contain a wealth of information, from sales numbers to financial data to inventory. This data is critical to powering a unified approach, as well as numerous automations.

By syncing your POS and ERP systems, you can count on automated:

• Inventory syncing

• Sales totals

• Tax documentation and bookkeeping

• Payroll

• Financial reporting

• Logistics and supply chain workflows

The above is only a sampling of the numerous workflows and manual tasks you can automate and streamline by integrating your POS and ERP. With further advances in automation and platforms, you’ll be able to streamline more and more.

CRM integration for a 360° customer view.

Your CRM holds your customer data: their purchase history, preferences, and interactions. But often, this data is fragmented. Online purchases are in one place, in-store visits in another, and support tickets elsewhere.

A unified commerce strategy changes this by integrating your CRM with every touchpoint.

Proper CRM integration creates a single, complete customer profile. It captures every interaction and purchase, allowing you to deliver personalized experiences that strengthen relationships.

Real-time inventory and order sync.

Real-time inventory and order syncing is a must for both unified commerce and scaling your business. With each location, digital storefront, or marketplace you add, you further complicate your inventory process.

Real-time synchronization means every sale, return, and inventory adjustment is reflected instantly across all sales channels and all warehouses.

BigCommerce can take the stress out of inventory management by giving you the ability to easily manage your products across numerous channels, centralized order processing, automated syncing, and more.

Product information and feed management.

Even if your product catalog is small right now, that may not always be the case. As your company grows, your catalog is likely to grow right along with it.

Big catalogs and complex products can result in data headaches, inaccurate product descriptions, and restrict your growth. Unified commerce can fix this.

By connecting your PIM with the rest of your ecommerce platform and tools, you can:

• Automatically update product listings across marketplaces

• Reduce manual data entry

• Improve your go-to-market time

• Equip sales with the latest in product material

While a PIM will help you with the above, there are additional tools you can add that further support your unified strategy. For example, feed management tools like Feedonomics optimize listings for each marketplace or ad platform. This ensures accuracy, consistency, and visibility everywhere you sell.

Unified payments and financial reconciliation.

Within ecommerce, payment processing is easy to set and forget. If a customer can make a purchase and you get paid, that’s enough, right?

Even if your current payment setup works, this may not always be the case. If your focus is on growth, adding physical POS systems into the mix, or venturing into international markets, you could quickly find yourself needing something more comprehensive.

Without a unified payment system, any of the above could result in you having to manually enter payment data or utilize multiple tools to facilitate payments in different markets.

Connecting your payment systems on the backend and using a single gateway eliminates manual data entry, reducing errors and saving you time.

Because you’re leveraging an API-first ecommerce platform, you can easily integrate additional tools into the mix if needed for international markets.

How BigCommerce enables unified commerce

Achieving the unified backend that powers unified commerce rights a strong, flexible foundation. BigCommerce offers just that.

API-first and headless flexibility.

BigCommerce provides the backbone for connected retail, linking your checkout, merchandising, and order management systems seamlessly.

Everything talks in real time, and no data gets locked away.

With more than 1,200 integrations and apps, BigCommerce makes it easy for you to add functionality, continue with tools you already like and use, and build on a strong foundation.

We support headless commerce, too. Build your storefront however you want while BigCommerce handles transactions, inventory, and fulfillment behind the scenes.

The result? Creative freedom up front, reliable power in back. Your business runs as one connected system.

Movora is a great example of this headless commerce in action. A provider of veterinary medtech for more than 30 years, Movora had a number of legacy systems that were slowing them down.

After joining BigCommerce, Movora was able to drop seven disconnected platforms and achieve:

100% US ecommerce growth within months of go-live

10% YoY growth in all three active regions

+7% online order volume within months

See more in the full case study here.

Deep integrations with POS and ERP systems.

Whether you have brick-and-mortar locations or sell at events, POS integration can help you sync sales on and offline.

With the addition of ERP integration, you can benefit from automated inventory updates, streamlined financial reporting, and more. And BigCommerce can do it all.

BigCommerce links directly to major ERP and POS systems, keeping every channel in sync.

• In-store and online channel sync

• Sales automatically update in your inventory

• Orders flow into your ERP

• Accounting info updates automatically

The level of connectivity offered by BigCommerce gives you an organization without data silos, and without time lost to manual data entry. With improved financial reporting, you can better utilize your resources, and build a more financially stable future.

Feedonomics: Unified product feeds across all channels.

A unified commerce strategy demands that your product information matches perfectly across your website, marketplaces, social channels, and ad platforms.

Feedonomics, a BigCommerce company, centralizes and optimizes your product data feeds to make this happen. Accurate details reach every platform, whether on marketplaces or social media platforms. It simplifies complex requirements. Manual updates disappear, and errors drop dramatically.

This centralized approach:

• Reduces listing errors

• Keeps product visibility strong

• Powers personalized marketing

• And boosts conversions

Open SaaS and composable commerce readiness.

With composable commerce, you can plug-and-play features and tools as needed using integrations, like those powered by APIs. Built from the ground up for composable commerce, BigCommerce makes it easy to flex and grow your store as needed.

The BigCommerce platform serves as the foundation, letting you build the store you want with:

• Extensive API support

• Headless and low/no code site support, making it easy to build custom pages

• Support for your favorite content system, marketing tools, and beyond

• Enterprise-level security and performance

In the past, custom ecommerce platforms usually entailed extensive infrastructure management. With BigCommerce, anyone can be a developer.

The final word

There’s no telling what the future of ecommerce holds, but one thing is certain: the days of single-channel sales are over.

Unified commerce will almost certainly look different in a year or two when compared to today, but the value provided by uniting your systems on the backend will continue to pay off regardless.

“We’ve seen in the fashion space how newer companies are coming in and reacting on a dime around social media trends and the like. Moving forward, you’re going to need that speed across your whole business. You’ll only achieve this if you have your data in order, tailored across channels. How? Unified commerce.”

-Doug Hollinger, Chief Strategy Officer at Commerce

The BigCommerce ecosystem provides a secure, flexible, scalable infrastructure that can adapt to meet whatever changes the future throws your way. With extensive API support and the ability to connect everything from physical stores to mobile apps, we provide everything you need to unite your systems and deliver a modern experience.

All you have to do is provide your brand and ideas.

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