E-commerce and physical stores: synchronize your points of sale for a seamless customer experience
Whether shopping online and picking up in-store, or the other way around, customers now effortlessly switch between sales channels. With 86% of buyers researching online before making a purchase in a physical store¹, omnichannel has become essential over the past decade.
But unified commerce takes things a step further. It doesn’t just integrate all channels; it connects them, providing a comprehensive customer view and ensuring a smooth, seamless experience.
Many merchants face challenges in aligning their sales channels, leading to friction and missed opportunities. Thankfully, there are tools available to help implement effective strategies.
A strategic issue for commerce
Why is unified commerce essential for stores?
Unified commerce aims to synchronize all touchpoints to deliver a seamless customer experience. For instance, a customer might spot an item in an online ad, verify its availability in-store via the e-commerce site, and then complete the purchase in-store.
By integrating inventory, orders, products, and customer data on one platform, this approach ensures real-time management and prevents stock shortages during the purchasing journey. It also enhances customer insight, enabling personalized interactions both in-store and online, which boosts satisfaction and loyalty.
Identify and fix friction points
An inefficient shopping journey can create numerous friction points. A common issue is the lack of inventory synchronization: a customer sees a product available online, but it’s out of stock when they visit the physical store. This inconsistency, caused by the lack of real-time updates between the store and eCommerce, results in lost sales and frustration.
A fragmented customer experience is another significant hurdle. Issues like uncoordinated loyalty programs, price discrepancies between the online store and physical locations, and the inability to return an online purchase in-store all hurt customer satisfaction.
Adapting to today’s customer demands
By 2025, consumers will expect smooth transitions between digital and physical sales channels. Real-time access to product availability is crucial to avoid frustrations, and hybrid shopping experiences—such as online research, in-store testing, and mobile purchases—are becoming the norm.
Customers seek flexible purchase and delivery options like click and collect, quick commerce, and express delivery. They also desire personalization: customer service that retains exchange history, offers suggestions based on past purchases, and provides special offers.
Synchronizing sales channels
Real-time management
Integrating real-time inventory between eCommerce and physical stores allows you to:
- Avoid stockouts,
- Ensure a seamless customer experience,
- And maximize sales.
This synchronization depends on using centralized management software. Customers can directly check product availability. Key functionalities of such solutions include:
- Automatic inventory synchronization between the eCommerce site, stores, and warehouse,
- Smart priority management, optimizing inventory allocation based on demand,
- Real-time tracking of stock movements, ensuring instant updates and better anticipating needs.
Orisha Commerce provides a unified commerce management solution that synchronizes inventory in real-time, ensuring precise visibility and eliminating stockouts..
Click and collect and ship from store: the advantages of the hybrid journey
Click and collect enables customers to order and pay online, then pick up their purchases at a physical store at their chosen time slot. Ship from store ships online orders directly from stores instead of a central warehouse. This model enables faster delivery, optimizes store inventory, and reduces logistics costs.
These flexible and speedy services meet consumer expectations but require perfect synchronization of inventory and data. Orisha Commerce eases the implementation of these services by ensuring smooth order and inventory management.
Essential technological tools
Omnichannel management relies on technological tools to synchronize different channels. Platforms like Orisha Commerce centralize inventory, orders, products, and customer relationships. Offering a real-time view of all operations, they facilitate decision-making and optimize commercial efficiency.
The recipe for a flawless customer journey
Training your sales associates
To ensure a seamless and consistent customer experience across all sales channels, sales associates need training in omnichannel strategies. They must understand the challenges and benefits of this approach through dedicated training sessions.
Mastering technical tools is crucial for navigating between systems such as:
- Unified management platforms,
- PIM (Product Information Management) for consistent product data,
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for a 360° customer view.
Sales associates can thus anticipate customer needs and deliver optimized service.
Ensuring smooth customer interactions
In a unified environment, customers expect a seamless transition between channels while retaining their information and receiving consistent service. A unified platform centralizes all interactions, providing a unique customer profile, real-time synchronization, and continuous follow-up.
Support channels can be synchronized, enabling customers to ask a question on one channel and get an answer on another. This involves integrating various touchpoints (email, chat, phone, social media) and self-service solutions like chatbots and dynamic FAQs.
Leveraging data for personalization
Leveraging customer data smartly allows for enhanced personalization and sales optimization both online and in-store. Essential data to collect includes:
- Transactional: past purchases, average cart, purchase frequency,
- Behavioral: visited pages, viewed products, interactions with marketing emails,
- Declared: stated preferences (colors, styles, interests),
- Contextual: location, weather, seasonal events.
A unified commerce platform consolidates this data to provide a unique customer view. This allows for personalized recommendations and online communications. In-store, the experience is enhanced by sales associates with tablets, interactive kiosks, and clienteling services tailored to shopping habits.
Evaluating and optimizing strategies
Tracking the performance of different channels
Whether online or in-store, each channel has key performance indicators:
- eCommerce: conversion rate, average cart, cart abandonment rate, CAC, return rate,
- Physical stores: conversion rate, revenue per square meter, average ticket, retention rate, impact of click and collect on overall sales,
- Social media & marketplaces: engagement, ad conversion rate, ad ROI.
Performance analysis helps optimize investments and drive sales.
Leveraging customer feedback
Customer reviews are a valuable source for continuous improvement. By analyzing feedback from various channels (internet, social media, surveys), merchants can identify friction points and optimize the shopping journey to refine their approach.
Meeting new consumer expectations
Some brands have already implemented impressive strategies to meet consumer expectations:
- Historically focused on physical stores, Zara has evolved toward a unified approach, strengthening its online presence, optimizing its mobile app, and integrating RFID technology, along with click and collect…
- Nike has adopted a hybrid approach, combining online sales, a mobile app, and physical stores. The brand notably launched the NikePlus program, offering personalized recommendations and online product reservations for in-store fitting.
Adopting a unified commerce strategy is a powerful growth and loyalty lever. By synchronizing their sales channels, merchants provide a seamless experience and turn each interaction into a sales opportunity.
It’s time to embrace a unified approach to meet new consumer expectations and maximize your commercial performance. Discover the ultimate unified commerce experience.
Sources :
¹ OpinionWay and Akeneo survey on consumers and product information (in French)
