Omnichannel commerce

With technology evolving every day, there are increasing devices that customers shop from. This means more opportunities for businesses to explore, make more sales, build relationships with customers, and grow revenue. The devices customers shop on have different requirements for serving a sales channel to end-users. Hence, the presentation layer must be unique to each device yet with a consistent customer experience.

Merchants distribute goods or services from manufacturers to consumers. Consumers engage on any sales channel as they deem fit to make purchases. Thus, businesses need to sell their products with a consistent experience on several channels or devices (website, mobile app, chatbot, watch, IoT device, etc.) consumers shop on.

What is single-channel commerce?

Single-channel commerce allows developers to build ecommerce to sell products (goods or services) via one channel, typically a website. Merchants can reach customers through only one distribution option (either online or offline). With the reduced cost of setting up many channels and logistics investment, this approach is a great way to get started with digital commerce. However, a downside with this approach is that businesses will miss opportunities to sell to customers shopping on other channels. More opportunities to sell are directly proportional to more conversions, retention, and revenue. No business wants to miss this, right?!

Scaling single-channel commerce is hectic and time-consuming. Selling on more channels requires more employees and development work. Developers need to clone their existing stack (including data and management) for each new channel. They will also duplicate any form of future change or update made across all channels. Overall, this is not effective for development and business.

According to Marketing Week, consumers use an average of almost six touch-points with nearly 50% regularly using more than four. Hence, there is a need for new solutions to meet up with the evolving digital commerce age.

What is omnichannel commerce?

While businesses tried to extend the single-channel commerce approach, they began to sell their products on multiple channels. However, these channels become very distinct from each other in terms of customer experience, management, data collection, and personalization. Hence, developers need to build more sales channels, but with a connected, unified, and personalized customer experience.

The goal of omnichannel commerce is to provide a streamlined and consistent customer experience. All supported channels will be managed from a central point to ensure consistency and effective management. With the Omnichannel commerce approach, developers can gather data from consumers and deliver personal experiences on each channel by dynamically showing content based on demographics, purchase history, or previous customers' activity. This is essential to increase engagement, sales, and retention. According to the research by Aberdeen Group, companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain, on average, 89% of their customers, compared to the customer retention rate of 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.

The emergence of modern technologies and mobile devices has led to significant digital commerce changes and more sales strategy opportunities. Businesses hence need to seize these opportunities and embrace Omnichannel commerce.

Benefits of omnichannel commerce

Customers can purchase on any channel with a better and consistent experience, which leads to better engagements, conversions, retention, and revenue. According to a survey conducted by Aspect Software, businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates than businesses that don't.

With the Omnichannel commerce approach, developers can collect data from more channels customers shop from. This allows them to understand customers' actions and needs better, take feedback, and implement new personalized strategies. The implemented strategies will result in customer satisfaction and increased engagement. Omnichannel commerce makes it possible than ever to engage with customers how they want to be engaged.

Available resources and support from a central hub are optimized across all channels for maximum efficiency. This allows consistency in all levels of operation. The ultimate goal of all digital commerce businesses is to satisfy customers and increase revenue. The Omnichannel commerce approach is the perfect solution that supports all the activities required to achieve both goals.

How Commerce Layer supports omnichannel commerce

Headless commerce decouples the presentation layer from the core business/backend, making it easier to render the platform on any presentation layer. With Commerce Layer, you can build and manage your business/backend logic from a central hub and use our commerce APIs to serve a consistent customer experience on any channel you decide to support.

Serving all your channels from one backend powered by Commerce Layer makes your development workflow easier. It becomes easier to future-proof. Hence, you can provide Omnichannel experiences to your customers, make them happy, keep them coming back, and increase your business's performance.