Recently, we teamed up with Shopify to host a breakfast event on the Future of Commerce. From AI to user behaviour and habits, there’s a lot of innovation and change happening in the ecommerce space making it more important than ever to be prepared and implement the right technology.
On the morning, our CEO Rob Williams and Shopify’s Senior Partner Manager, Daniel Bowden, discussed challenges and trends in ecommerce. Here’s a breakdown of what we’re seeing and a trend to watch.
Key challenges
In terms of industry wide challenges, Shopify highlighted rising interest rates and inflation pressure, complex regulations, changing customer behaviour and competitive threats as the four most significant challenges.
On tech stack, key challenges include lack of innovation, reliability and security risks, disconnected customer experiences and rising TCO of technology.
With over 675 million unique shoppers purchasing from businesses on Shopify in 2023 and operating in over 175 countries, Shopify has deep insight into what’s really happening in our industry.
Despite these challenges, businesses are looking to scale at speed and for a fraction of the cost.
As the most scaled commerce platform in the world and with the highest rate of innovation compared to other providers, Shopify are making real strides in the ecommerce world and helping global businesses conquer these challenges.
In fact, 10% of US ecommerce flows through Shopify. Moving on to trends, what’s one major trend that should be on all our radars?
Unified commerce
For Shopify unified commerce is a major trend and significant opportunity for retailers.
Retail has evolved significantly. With customers now making purchases through a combination of offline and online channels, Shopify describe unified commerce as ’empowering retailers to deliver seamless customer experiences whilst optimising operations and making better data-driven decisions.’
It brings all of your core systems and commerce channels into one single platform allowing organisations to manage everything from one place and use these insights to enhance decision making.
Our Head of Consultancy, Tanya Peasgood shares her insights on how retail has evolved in recent years.
“During COVID we saw a lot of retailers and distributors move to selling through online channels including marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. As the High Street recovers, these organisations are now having to consider how they reconcile and manage their online and offline presence. Unifying these commerce channels using platforms like Shopify provides them with efficiencies in managing their business and growing their understanding of their customers”
Unified commerce has become a significant growth area for Shopify as it helps businesses tackle the challenges the current landscape presents. It’s not just about delivering a consistent and personalised brand experience but also inventory management, order fulfillment and customer service.
Shopify are uniquely positioned to support this as they can offer support for B2C, D2C, B2B transactions online, marketplace solutions, and with Shopify POS can directly connect this to the in-store experience.
With various backend systems and channels, it has become ever more important for organisations to deliver the consistent, seamless and engaging experiences that customers expect.
Benefits of unified commerce
Having implemented unified commerce for many clients, Shopify has seen fantastic results. Other industry reports have noted the same.
Some of the benefits of unified commerce include;
- Improved sales and revenue – Through models such as BOPIS (Buy online, pick up in store) retailers provide a consistent and convenient experience. Research by Adyen found unified commerce can increase Average Order Value (AOV) and order frequency.
- Increased customer loyalty – Unified commerce enables retailers to leverage first-party data to their advantage, a crucial benefit as we prepare for a cookie-less future. Accenture found that 75% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a retailer that recognises their name, recommends options based on their purchase history or knows about it.
- Better operational efficiency – As a unified commerce approach streamlines operations and provides oversight of all commerce processes, this improves inventory management and reduces manual processes. This can reduce order fulfilment costs as this real-time view enhances decision-making while boosting customer loyalty.
Unified commerce is certainly a trend to watch and there are many more benefits. If you’re keen to learn more about how you can utilise Shopify to adopt a unified commerce approach, chat to our team. Our ecommerce experts have a proven track record of using data-led insights to streamline processes, increase sales and boost revenue.
