Omnichannel, Unified commerce and Composable commerce – What do the trends mean for your integration?

John Thyr at iCore is a retail expert with years of experience helping companies solve business processes through smart IT support and system integration – in cost-effective ways.

In the future, he mainly sees three major trends that retailers are adopting: Omnichannel, Unified commerce and Composable commerce.

- Omnichannel is probably the most familiar of the three – the idea that the offer is the same regardless of which channel the customer buys through.

- Unified commerce means a way of working in trade that collects all data related to your customers and sales channels in one place. The goal is to offer customers a unified buying journey, where they can move seamlessly between your different channels without having to 'start over' with their purchases each time.

- Composable commerce is a more technical term that means being able to use several different systems at the same time in a trading system. They are powerful applications that communicate with each other through well-defined APIs. It is therefore important to build a solution on a technical base that enables flexibility and that you expand the functionality by replacing individual components instead of entire solutions.

What all three concepts have in common is that IT systems need to work together. There's no such thing as an off-the-shelf system that does everything – instead, retailers typically piece together a mix of smaller, specialized applications into one functioning whole. That only works if the systems can talk to each other, which means large volumes of data flowing between them constantly.

Modern applications also tend to have much shorter life cycles than before. Replacing or upgrading them requires a loosely coupled architecture, where systems aren't rigidly wired together.

Data enables a personalized customer experience

- Hybrid shopping has gone from a future vision to everyday reality. Customers research online, try products in-store, and might complete the purchase on their phone. It sounds simple, but it places huge demands on keeping customer, inventory, and product data consistent in real time across every channel. That's exactly where integration becomes critical.

A personal customer experience can only be delivered by getting to know each customer individually, then it is possible to get close to what the customer expects in the future. Data makes this possible.

- Using all customer data and analyzing behavior is not only the best way to proceed, but the way that gives competitive advantages in both marketing and sales.

AI and data-driven retail – what's next

One trend that's accelerated sharply is the use of AI to personalize the customer experience and streamline internal processes. But AI is only as good as the data it's fed.

– There's a lot of talk about AI in retail right now, and the opportunities are real. But it depends on your data being accurate, up to date, and available in real time. It's an integration problem before it's an AI problem, says John.

Acquisition and change of ownership

Retail moves fast, and that means brands and store chains are constantly merging or changing hands. When part of a business changes ownership, things can get messy fast – especially when the IT systems are tightly woven into the rest of the operation. John recalls one case in particular.

– A large ownership group sold off an entire store chain where all the IT systems had been bundled into a single unit. Our job was to cut every connection and build a completely new IT infrastructure for the spun-off chain – while it stayed open for business as usual. It was a tough challenge, but we pulled it off. A big reason we could handle something that complex was that iCore came in early and helped plan the separation from the start.

Tips from John

- Talk to us at iCore early, whether it's about developing new business processes or untangling existing ones. That way, we can build something that's both robust and flexible from the start, instead of patching things up afterwards. And as a customer, you get exactly the functionality you need, at a cost-conscious price.