Unified commerce is table stakes—but often misunderstood. For a truly compelling customer experience, retailers need to adopt a truly unified solution that brings their business’s backend closer to their customer.

Whether a customer is shopping in-store, online, or via their mobile device, unified commerce guarantees consistent pricing, promotions, and inventory levels—and establishes a fully integrated customer journey. 

During a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Max Kirby, who works in Comms and Strategy at Stripe, Dil Hussain, Co-founder and CEO at Dines, and Daniel Keyes, Senior Analyst of Merchant Services at Javelin Strategy & Research, dug into unified commerce, its role in the customer journey, and how it can enhance the overall consumer experience. 

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Understanding Unified Commerce 

When merchants first hear of unified commerce, the idea of omnichannel strategy also comes to mind—particularly as both involve developing a cross-channel shopping experience online and in-person. However, it’s much more than that, Kirby explained. Unified commerce means meeting customers where they are, throughout various channels and at any stage of the buyer’s journey. 

“I think people miss that it’s about bringing the front office and back office together,” said Stripe’s Kirby. “Unifying commerce means unifying both the customer’s commerce experience and the merchant’s commerce infrastructure.

“Merchants today want to sell direct to the customer, but also through retail partners. Maybe they’re an online marketplace, they may want to set up a loyalty scheme, they may want to offer membership subscriptions, and no matter the interface, they want to have a really coherent experience with the customer. So that’s how we think about unified commerce.” 

Through unified commerce, merchants can gather and connect all the essential data points as well as customer interactions, revealing a comprehensive view of their customers. Hussain, a Stripe client, explained it this way: “Unified commerce is about bringing all the data, all the information, all the kind of personalization that a customer may have remotely or on-site in a retail o...