Unified Commerce in Retail: Business Case and Implementation

They’re one of your best customers, having spent over $2,000 on your website in the past six months. 

Today, they walk into your flagship store for the first time, excited to finally experience their favorite brand in person. 

To the sales associate, however, they’re a complete stranger. The employee has no access to the customer’s purchase history or VIP status. A golden opportunity to provide a high-end experience … completely missed. 

It’s not a staff training problem. In fact, it’s a technology problem—one easily fixed by a unified commerce solution. 

Ahead, you’ll learn how unified commerce works as a business strategy, and how to implement it in your operation. 

Is your retail tech creating problems instead of solving them?

In the relentless pursuit of a modern customer experience, many retailers have created a web of complexity. 

Data from the Seeing Around Corners study found the average marketing team juggles 7–10 tools just to deliver personalization—and it’s becoming expensive and harder to manage. Each extra integration fragments customer insight, slows decision-making, and raises costs. 

It’s something called a “fragmentation tax” that retailers pay:

• Technical overhead: Your development team gets trapped in an endless cycle of maintenance. Instead of developing new features, they spend their time patching integrations, managing vendor relationships, and fixing data-sync errors.
• Operational friction: Staff waste hours on duplicate data entry and require costly training on dozens of disconnected systems.
• Business drag: New products take longer to launch, you can’t react quickly to market changes, and customers are frustrated with your shopping experience.
• Innovation deficit: Your budget is spent on maintenance, not research and development. Every dollar spent on middleware and bug fixes is a dollar not invested in growing your brand. 

It’s an unsustainable cycle, but it’s not all doom and gloom. An independent analysis found that retailers on Shopify POS trimmed total cost of ownership (TCO) by 22% compared with rival setups, largely because unifying ecommerce and store operations removed middleware and duplicate workflows. 

Unified commerce is not omnichannel retail

The issue lies in a common misunderstanding. “Omnichannel” is not the same as “unified.” 

Omnichannel focuses on connecting the front-end customer journey. Unified commerce connects the entire business—from customer-facing channels to back-end operations like inventory, order management, and customer data—on a single, native platform. It creates a single brain for the entire retail operation. 

This shift from merely connected systems to a truly unified platform is critical for efficiency and growth. When retailer Oak + Fort unified their operations, it reduced staff time spent on order management by 50 hours per week.

"This change has reduced 50 hours/week in headquartered staff time, 40 hours/week with customer experience teams, and 10 hours/week from IT support," says Jennifer Pearson, head of technology and ecommerce. "Across our 42 retail locations, we're also saving 80 hours/week of shop floor employee time." The brand also eliminated the challenges of managing multiple systems for customer data and inventory. 

"We go through constant inventory fluctuations and shifting demands," explains Guillaume Jaillet, chief omnichannel officer. "It was hard to reliably and accurately represent which stores had certain items in stock to our digital customers when they wanted to try something on." After unifying their operations, they reduced operating costs by 47% while increasing efficiency.

📚 Read: Omnichannel vs. Unified Commerce: Which is Better?

Market forces driving enterprise adoption 

Over the past two years, retail has crossed a tipping point where fragmented architecture is unprofitable. 

Shoppers now glide from Instagram Reels to in-store checkout without thinking about channels, and they penalize any friction along the way. Speakers at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show 2025 framed it as customers viewing the brand as one continuous experience and expecting personal, real-time service everywhere they shop.

Meeting these expectations comes with financial stakes. A Bain and Aptos survey of 300 global retail executives found 99% believe unified commerce improves profitability and sales growth, yet only a minority have achieved it at scale. 

Field evidence backs up these beliefs. 2025 research from Manhattan Associates shows that mature unified commerce operators enjoy 23% higher inventory turnover and 1.5 times higher lifetime value (LTV) compared to non-unified peers. 

Organizations are also treating technical debt as a liability. Security vulnerabilities, compliance exposure, and prolonged time to market are now quantified risks. 

A unified commerce strategy offers the solution: one stack, one data model, and the agility to pivot as quickly as the market does. Even when the budget is tight, the alternative costs more, moves slower, and satisfies customers less. 

The benefits of a unified commerce retail strategy

Gaining a 360-degree customer view to drive loyalty

Adobe’s 2025 Digital Trends report finds 71% of consumers now expect brands to anticipate their needs with tailored offers, and 78% demand seamless movement between digital and physical touchpoints. It’s a standard that siloed systems cannot meet. 

Unified commerce solves this by merging every click, purchase, and interaction into a single customer profile. This 360-degree view helps you send relevant offers across email, ads, and point of sale (POS) in real time. The result is direct bottom-line impact: retailers that unify their data see an average 8.9% lift in annual sales growth.

Real-time inventory visibility across every location

Disconnected inventory creates operational chaos. Retailer Bared Footwear had to close their stores during online sales because their separate online and POS systems couldn’t sync inventory fast enough to prevent overselling. This was before they switched to Shopify, of course. 

“With Shopify, we have a unified commerce platform that makes the holistic experience we want to offer customers possible without burdening our team with clunky workarounds or high-risk situations,” says Alexandra McNab, COO of Bared Footwear. 

Unified commerce merges all stock data into a single, real-time pool. Your ecommerce, POS, and warehouses all read from the same data, eliminating manual reconciliation. 

Improved inventory visibility offers two major advantages for retailers:

1. They can confidently offer flexible fulfillment options like buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS).
2. They can adapt quickly to supply chain disruptions, transfer stock between locations, and protect revenue. 

Unifying DTC and B2B channels

The onset of unified retail technology is enabling DTC brands to expand into the multitrillion-dollar B2B market. In a fragmented system, these two revenue streams would run on entirely separate platforms, creating a fragmented view of the business. 

Unified commerce B2B software lets you run both DTC and B2B operations from a single back end, using the same centralized data. B2B-specific functions like company profiles, net payment terms, and wholesale price lists are managed within the same system that runs your retail promotions and POS.

Ethical chocolate brand Tony's Chocolonely faced this challenge as their custom-built platform couldn't keep up with their global DTC and B2B expansion. Moving to Shopify unified their operations and created a single, scalable template for international growth. The move drove double-digit revenue increases across key markets, including 70% growth in the US.

👉 Read Tony’s Chocolonely’s story. 

Boosting operational efficiency and reducing costs

A unified platform solves for the fragmentation tax mentioned above, as it eliminates expensive middleware and streamlines workflows. These efficiencies are reflected almost immediately across your organization:

• On the front line, pet food retailer Tomlinson’s reduced their average in-store checkout time by 56% by simplifying how discounts are applied.
• On the back end, apparel brand Bobo Choses cut time spent resolving technical issues by an impressive 80%.

These aren't isolated examples. A market report by EY found that retailers using a unified POS solution save the cost equivalent of 0.4 full-time employees per store. 

The same report confirmed that this efficiency directly fuels growth, contributing to an up to 5% uplift in total GMV and a 150% increase in omnichannel GMV quarterly, all while reducing the total cost of ownership by 22%.

Efficiency saves you money, yes, but it also reallocates resources from reactive maintenance to innovation. As Saül Aleu, CTO at Bobo Choses, puts it, "The time we used to devote to solving technical issues, we now use to add value to the business.”

How to implement a unified commerce retail model with Shopify

1. Centralize your data with Shopify as the core

Treat Shopify as the system of record for products, orders, customers, and inventory so every channel syncs with one source of truth. Then, build your customer profiles.

• Capture first-party data through every interaction shoppers have with your brand, whether they buy online, in-store through Shopify POS, or connected channels. The system creates and updates these profiles, and the segments refresh dynamically.
• Create customer segments based on any customer attribute or behavior. For example, you can build segments for "VIPs who purchased during Black Friday" or "lapsed customers who live in California."

Shopify also supports merging duplicate customer records via GraphQL customerMerge. A preview object lets you confirm outcomes before committing. If you have thousands of duplicate records, this makes it easy to clean up. 

💡 Tip: If eligible, install Shopify Audiences and enable Shopify Network Intelligence in customer privacy settings. You can use your customer data to generate high-intent audiences to export to Meta, Google, and Pinterest. 

Brands using Shopify Audiences drive up to two times more retargeting conversions compared to the next available tactic. 

2. Integrate physical and digital touchpoints using Shopify POS

A single customer view and unified inventory only create value when your store associates can use that information to help customers in the moment.

The next step is to unify your store and website so shoppers get consistent pricing, availability, and service everywhere. Within your Shopify admin, there are a few configurations to prioritize: 

• Endless aisle and ship from store: Fulfill store orders to a customer’s address when inventory lives at another location.
• Local pickup and delivery: Reduce shipping costs and let customers pick up orders in-store or have them delivered locally. 
• Clienteling tools: Show unified history and customer metafields in POS so staff can personalize in-store interactions. 

There are also security and management controls built into Shopify POS. You can create custom roles and permissions to define what actions staff members can take. This includes who can apply custom discounts, process returns, edit inventory, or edit sales reports. 

3. Leverage App Store partners to sync your tools

For some enterprises, unified commerce involves integrating tools like your ERP without brittle connections that increase costs. Shopify lets you natively connect ERP systems like NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics through the Global ERP Program. 

You’re not limited to just ERP connections either. The Shopify App Store has over 8,000 apps from best-in-class brands like Klaviyo and Gorgias. All partner data routes into your customer profiles, keeping them accurate and nuanced for better marketing. 

💡Tip: There are a lot of apps to choose from, we get it. To guarantee you choose a reliable partner, rely on Shopify’s Partner Program, Technology Track as your seal of approval.

The program vets and certifies apps that meet the highest standards for performance, privacy, and support. Also look for the “Built for Shopify” status, which designates top-tier apps offering a seamless experience. 

4. Automate your workflows

Shopify Flow is our native automation tool built to free up time and streamline operations. Using a no-code visual editor, you can build “if this, then that” workflows activated by specific triggers. 

For example, when inventory levels change, Flow can automatically perform a series of merchandising actions. You can build a workflow that automatically unpublishes a product from your online store the moment its inventory hits zero, so customers don’t experience stockouts.

The same workflow can also identify when stock drops below a certain threshold (like 10 units), automatically tagging the product as "Low stock" and adding it to a "Last Chance" sale collection.

Design custom ecommerce automations from scratch to fit your processes or browse hundreds of prebuilt templates in the Flow library to get started immediately.

How Car Toys unlocked growth with unified commerce

Now that you understand fragmentation tax and how unification helps, let’s look at a real-world example.

For Car Toys, the largest independent car audio and mobile electronics retailer in the US, unified commerce was key to simplifying a complex business model stalled by their tech. 

The company battled high platform fees and constant integration failures that created a clunky buying process. “Our business is very custom-oriented,” says Shelly Fuller, Car Toys’ director of operations. 

“Each customer's installation and parts package is unique, so we wanted to simplify the entire process for them.” The team found their previous platform's limits on customization made it challenging to maintain quality across their online and in-store channels.

Car Toys migrated to Shopify to create a single, flexible platform for their entire operation. With the help of Shopify Partner Teifi Digital, the team completed a complex migration in a compressed timeline, launching a full-featured site that unified their core business needs.

The new solution, built on Shopify and Shopify POS, unified key functions that were previously disconnected, including:

• An online appointment-booking system
• Real-time inventory visibility across all store locations
• A unified gift card program for purchases and redemptions

The move to Shopify solved Car Toys' technical issues, but it also gave them a path forward for the entire business. As Shelly concludes, “Moving to Shopify has fundamentally redefined our vision for unified commerce, showing us what’s possible when technology aligns with business goals.”