How a single view of customer and inventory data translates to happier customers

“A lot of established retailers are struggling with legacy systems and have bolted on solutions for the digital space that don’t easily integrate. The reason unified commerce resonated with me is that it focuses on having one core platform to do the heavy lifting and having a single source of truth to manage the customer data, inventory and order orchestration. Rather than relying on too many systems to push and pull data everywhere.”

This is how Shane Lenton, Cue Clothing’s CIO and number 8 on 2020’s Australia CIO50, described  the Infinity unified commerce platform. Infinity’s single view of inventory and customer has helped Cue launch many inventive, connected and personalised experiences that delight customers, build loyalty, drive growth and improve profitability.    

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So how does a single source of truth translate to customer satisfaction and new revenue streams?

If your retail management system has been built up organically and relies on complex dependencies, you’ll know how difficult, slow and expensive it can be to integrate with modern technologies and create new customer experiences.

A unified commerce platform can take that pain away. It bypasses the limitations of legacy and omnichannel systems by linking internal channel silos and letting you easily share data and services across all areas.

With one platform, you gain the single source of truth that gives you real-time visibility of your customer, inventory and fulfilment data across all your stores and channels. 

Combine Infinity’s data accessibility with its open platform, integrations and APIs, and you can offer customers the easy purchase, convenient delivery, and stress-free return options they want while recognising and rewarding the shopping they do with you. Here’s how:

One view of stock leads to increased sales

Infinity lets you consolidate your inventory from all locations – warehouse, individual store, on order – and make it available for customers to buy anywhere, at any time by website, app, store or via your call centre. You’ll increase margins while reducing your inventory holding.

Improve profitability by fulfilling orders the way customers want

When your data is unified, you can offer a range of fulfilment options no matter what channel an order comes in from. Click-and-collect, store-to-door delivery, drop shipping and ‘endless aisle’ fulfilment are all possible. You choose what’s best for customers and most profitable for you.

Make ‘buy anywhere, return anywhere’ a reality

With Infinity’s simple and cost effective returns capability, you can manage the entire process including return payment transactions, price validation, inventory re-allocations, notifications and customer record updating. 

To know them is to love them

Whether a staff member or a customer enters the customer’s details into your system or loyalty program in-store or online, that information is captured and stored in one place so you can recognise them consistently wherever they shop with you. Using that data and Infinity’s loyalty capabilities, you’ll know which customers are most profitable and what their preferences are. Store teams can see this information as well to offer personalised service and encourage conversion at point of sale.

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See what a single source of data truth can do for your business

If you want to expand your ability to offer a seamless blend of physical and digital customer experiences, it’s time to unify your data. Contact us to get started now.

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For more on unified commerce and why it’s the future of retail, download this free ebook. 

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Power your retail innovation strategy with APIs

Connecting channels and personalising the shopping experience is vital to meeting consumers’ rising expectations. One major advantage of using a unified commerce platform as your retail management system (RMS), is its open architecture that lets you easily make those connections with APIs.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are present in every part of our digital world. Every time you use an app like LinkedIn, make a Skype call or listen to Spotify on your phone, there’s an API in action.

APIs let you add specialised functionality to a website, application, platform or software without having to write all of the back-end code. By using APIs, you can connect tools and expose data in real time, rather than having to replicate or move it. The result is one set of functions that’s available across various systems, plus an easy way to plug in and deploy new services, channels and devices. 

These improvements let you shift your team’s priority from maintenance to innovation. By using APIs to access existing solutions in the market, you are free to focus your development efforts on the front-end. You can be more agile and create a community of third-party apps and systems that work together in an ecosystem. As a result, you’ll reduce integration and maintenance overheads, increase real-time accuracy and enjoy virtually limitless scalability and agility.

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APIs in action

Here are just some of the ways APIs help you optimise operations and personalise customer experiences:

Retail anywhere, any time

APIs let you easily expose your product catalogues and other eCommerce solutions to give customers many more ways to engage with your brand, including social commerce.

Deliver anywhere, any how

Shipping and delivery APIs let you integrate third party services to automate everything from the sale through to the parcel being delivered to your customer’s address of choice. Think fulfilment options like click-and-collect, store-to-door and drop shipping.

Payment convenience counts

Give consumers the payment options and ‘buy-now, pay later’ services they want. Infinity was the first in the world to integrate with Afterpay at point of sale and supports Adyen, Smartpay, Laybuy, Alipay, WeChat Pay, and Slyp to name a few payment partners.

Voice and visual to boost personalisation

Visual search APIs help customers quickly find the products they want – like Cue Clothing’s Style Finder mobile app. And you can consider using Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant APIs to further tailor the shopping experience and boosts sales.

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So how do you start making the most of APIs?

Begin by evaluating your company’s value chain. Can you easily integrate and use APIs to access third-party platforms and services to scale your business? Or can you release your own APIs to attract partners and build out your platform? The two options are not mutually exclusive. 

An API-enabled platform like Infinity lets you scale your business quickly by easily adding new apps and services as business requirements change.

We can also help if you’re looking for advice on how to create a strategy and implement an API programme that quickly creates customer and business value.

The end result is the ability to create extraordinary customer experiences that help to capture market opportunities, generate additional revenue and build brand advocacy.

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Find out more about Infinity APIs and our integration partners. Then contact us for advice on how to use APIs to achieve greater agility, faster growth and better margins.

How a unified commerce platform solves retail inventory problems

To provide the purchasing and fulfilment options you need for seamless experiences that delight customers and minimise costs, consider a unified commerce approach to get tight control of your inventory within your retail management system (RMS). 

Managing inventory is a retailer’s biggest challenge – no matter their size. It’s also the biggest cost. It’s a balancing act to strike the right stock levels and easily adjust those levels as your business changes. Understocks lead to missed sales and dissatisfied customers, and overstocks tie up your capital and result in markdowns that can hurt your margins. And in our on-demand world, customers expect access to products wherever and whenever they want.

But many retailers struggle with some of the fundamentals of inventory control, such as stock taking, demand forecasting, planning and receipting. Others launch self-serve channels that can only access rudimentary sales and inventory positions. That prevents them from offering the ‘buy anywhere, fulfil anywhere’ options that are best for customers and most profitable for them.

Unify your inventory 

A unified commerce platform gives you a single, accurate and up-to-date inventory view so you can be sure that you have the right product at the right place at the right time.

With unified inventory management across all locations, you can make better decisions about what stock to order and how to distribute it amongst your warehouses, call centres, and physical, mobile and online stores. 

You can react to trends quickly, and forecast demand based on historical data, sales forecasts and seasonal variations. And with the platform’s open architecture and APIs, you’re free to add new features, channels, apps and services that will increase customer satisfaction and benefit your business in many ways:

• Increase sales with ‘endless aisle’ capabilities that let you sell products stocked in any location and have them delivered direct or collected by the customer

• Reduce inventory costs by moving stock to the right location when it’s needed and cutting your overall stock requirements

• Offer more purchasing and fulfilment options to customers so they can locate items in-store, buy online, collect in-store, reserve online, receive the same day or at a time and location of their choice

• Optimise your product range by matching stock to each store’s location, community and demographics while still giving access to your complete range via endless aisle 

• Extend your range across more sales channels such as in-store kiosks, shoppable screens, pop-up stores, concessions and mobile devices

• Lower fulfilment costs by delivering direct to the customer using store-to-door, warehouse-to-door, click-and-collect or optimised sourcing.

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Retailers reaping inventory benefits with the Infinity unified commerce platform

Cue delivers anywhere, anyhow

With a ‘buy anywhere, fulfil anywhere’ strategy and Infinity’s centralised hub providing the inventory and fulfilment smarts, Cue Clothing is using its 240+ stores across Australasia to take on online giants like Amazon and changing the way customers shop.

Night ‘n Day gets tight control of inventory

By simplifying inventory management with Infinity, convenience grocery retailer Night ‘n Day is cutting costs, freeing up time and increasing net profit to around $12,000 per store each year.

T2 Tea unifies experiences

In 2019, T2 Tea chose Triquestra to modernise its retail system. Infinity will provide a central hub for T2’s inventory, point-of-sale and customer loyalty across its concession, wholesale, marketplace and ecommerce business, plus a growing global footprint of over 100 stores.

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To see the difference that an accurate and single view of inventory can make to your business, contact us.

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For more on unified commerce and why it’s the future of retail, download this free ebook. 

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What’s the difference between unified commerce and omnichannel?

There are many terms to describe retail management systems these days. And while they are used interchangeably, there is a difference between ‘omnichannel’ and ‘unified commerce’. Unified commerce is the next progression of what’s come before and simplifies the technology you need to give customers a consistent omnichannel shopping experience.

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Omnichannel offers options, and limitations 

With an omnichannel approach, you give customers the ability to shop in-store, online, via your app, over the phone, etc. 

But there’s a good chance these systems rely on out-of-date information and old or closed integration technology. Which means you might be connecting new channels to systems that aren’t updated in real time. And you could be duplicating data and finding that interoperability with each new technology is difficult, expensive and slow. 

As a result, many seemingly omnichannel experiences are held together with manual processes and complex integration. You end up with silos across your business which negatively impact your customer because they have to deal with information gaps, fewer fulfilment options, or having to start new conversations in each channel. 

For example, an omnichannel setup might enable data sharing between physical and online stores, but the contact centre is left out. So if a customer has a question about something they like online, they call your contact centre and your rep can’t see the customer’s recent online purchasing history or whether the customer’s nearest store has the item available for collection. 

Internally, staff must duplicate tasks because there’s no single version of data that everyone shares. This day-to-day inefficiency means teams have less time to spend on innovation and giving customers the personalised experiences they expect.

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Unified commerce simplifies consistent customer experience

Natalie Berg of NBK Retail says we no longer ‘go’ shopping, we just ‘are’ shopping. The only way to give consumers this seamlessness is to move beyond omnichannel to unified commerce.

Unified commerce is a platform. It centralises your customer and inventory data for one version of truth and its open architecture (using APIs) exposes that data to all your channels. 

With this single view of your data, you can move stock, update prices, add loyalty program rewards – whatever you like – across all your channels. The data stays in sync and transactions can be viewed in near real time. So customers get a ‘one brand’ experience: one person with one account, interacting with one unified brand. No hitches, no inconsistencies.

From a business perspective, unified commerce resolves issues inherent with traditional channel integration, and offers many more benefits:

• More accurate information for decision making

• Reduced inventory holdings and increased availability

• Optimised supply chain and order management

• More payment and fulfilment options

• Efficient processes and less manual overhead

• Faster innovation and speed to get new products and services to market 

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See how unified commerce solves many more of omnichannel’s limitations and how it can set you up to create the retail future you want. Download Unified Commerce is the Future of Retail now.

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What is unified commerce and why is it so important to retail success?

If you want to be more competitive in today’s retail world, you have to give customers the purchase, payment and fulfilment options they demand across your in-store, online and mobile channels. The best way to expand your offering and improve each customer experience, while lowering costs, is to unify your retail management.

Unified commerce is the term used for a retail software system that connects all your inventory and customer data to all your sales channels. It’s also known as frictionless retail, new retail, headless commerce, digital commerce, boundaryless retail and omnichannel (though we believe unified commerce is the nirvana of omnichannel as we explain in this blog).

According to Gartner, unified commerce is one of the top 10 trends that will impact the future of digital commerce. That’s because it gives consumers consistency across channels and a continuous experience throughout their journey with you.

BRP’s annual POS/Customer Engagement Survey shows that 94% of retailers have indicated that they have or plan to implement a single unified commerce platform within the next three years. And in Australia, there’s a $92 billion opportunity for businesses that are successful in rolling out a strong unified commerce platform. 

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So what exactly is unified commerce?

Unified commerce is a retail management system (RMS) that unifies all your customer and inventory data on one open, centralised commerce platform that exposes one version of truth to all channels. 

Which means that data stays in sync – across websites, apps, stores, call centres, kiosks, concession stores, wearable devices – and transactions can be viewed in near real time. So you can give each customer the best price and experience, whether they shop with you in-store, at home, or out and about.

With all these customer touch points connected, unified commerce lets you deliver holistic and personalised customer experiences more consistently. And treat each customer as the individual they are – one person with one account, interacting with one unified brand.

A unified commerce platform also helps you and your technology partners innovate quickly, reduce integration and operating costs, maximise margin, and deploy new services – efficiently and profitably.

Here’s how unified commerce helps you retail better

Inventory management

When you’ve got a single view of your inventory, you can move it around your business quickly and react to demand changes fast. You’ll find it’s much easier to manage stock to maximise sales opportunities and reduce holding costs.

Order management (OMS)

Because your inventory is optimised and visible across channels, you can offer a range of fulfilment options like click-and-collect, ship-from-store, endless aisle, split shipments – whatever suits your customers best.

Loyalty and customer management

Capture customer details via any channel. Then analyse their purchase and browsing history to show them you know them with communications, rewards and offers that are timely and relevant. In-store teams can see this information as well to offer personalised service and encourage conversion at point of sale.

Pricing and promotions

Pricing is shared across channels so customers can trust that they’ll pay the same price whether they shop with you in-store, online or in the field. And you can try out different promotions and pricing strategies quickly when an offer succeeds or doesn’t do as well as planned.

New product, service and channel innovation 

Using APIs on an open platform, you can connect third-party services and expose data in real time. Helping you build your competitive advantage and create a world of opportunity to give customers new, faster services and personalised interactions.  

No more silos

When everyone is using the same system and seeing the same data, you’ve got better internal collaboration with fewer roadblocks, and customers are happier because they’re getting the frictionless ‘one brand’ experience they want.

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If it’s time to take the next step from omnichannel and consider a unified commerce approach for your retail business, get the ebook, Unified Commerce is the Future of Retail.

It discusses the unified commerce business case, the four stages of transitioning your business to unified commerce and much more.

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Contextual commerce: Shane Lenton on the next chapter of retail

Contextual commerce is the game changing idea that people can transact the moment they have an urge to buy, instead of forcing them into a traditional purchasing channel. It’s the future of retail with massive opportunities to capture new audiences and incremental transactions.

I spoke with Shane Lenton, CIO at Cue Clothing, to get his thoughts on contextual commerce and advice on how to make the move. Shane is a retail leader who has transformed Cue with innovation and technology to give customers personalised and frictionless experiences across physical, online, mobile, concession and call centre channels.

At Sydney’s 2019 Online Retailer conference, you won over the audience with your assertion that contextual commerce is the next big thing in  retail. What’s your definition of contextual commerce? 

SL: Contextual commerce is the idea that we can seamlessly implement purchase opportunities into everyday activities and natural environments. In other words, customers can buy anything, anytime, anywhere, with the click of a button. Or even just their voice. It’s a purchase made in the moment, with no need to stop what you were already doing.

That means thinking well beyond the boundaries of the traditional physical store and our current digital channels.

It has been talked about for quite a few years now, but few retailers have capitalised on the opportunity. As the technologies that support it have become more available and the social media platforms and messaging apps have evolved, it’s becoming more relevant in the Australasian market and there'll be far greater adoption.

It’s a game changer for retail because it creates new opportunities to create a frictionless experience for the customer and foster loyalty. Retailers that are willing to move early will benefit from higher conversions in new places and increased sales. Those who don’t keep up will be left behind very quickly.

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What’s an example of contextual commerce?   

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SL: Shopping on Instagram is one example that many people will be familiar with. It was a big moment for retail when it was introduced in early 2018. We were one of the first retailers to tag products in organic posts, which customers can then tap on to find out more information and make a purchase.

However, today customers are still required to add items to a cart and transact in the traditional way by logging onto our website to enter payment info and delivery details. With Instagram’s proposed new ‘Checkout on Instagram’ feature (currently in beta with a select group of brands in other markets), shoppers will be able to buy items without leaving the app. They will only need to enter their name, email, payment information and shipping address the first time they check out. 

This ability to allow the consumer to transact in the moment, within the context of the Instagram browsing experience, really hit home with the Online Retailer audience.

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What’s driving the adoption of contextual commerce? 

SL: There are three things triggering its growth. 

One: Consumer behaviour is constantly changing and people's attention spans are shortening. Everyone's busier and we’re being overloaded with content across every part of our lives. People now want to act on their impulses and buy at the time and place of their choice, with as little friction as possible. As the lines between shopping, buying and browsing blur, commerce is happening wherever consumers are and however they wish to interact.

Two: Contextual commerce is going to happen in retail because the social media platforms are going to ‘own’ the customer. Social networks like Facebook and WeChat know what we implicitly want and have the potential to take us from discovery to purchase in a few microseconds on their platforms. This shift to social commerce could be one of the biggest disruptions in retail, and threatens the dominance of Amazon and Google. That also means you're not going to have a direct one-to-one relationship with many of your customers, and you won’t receive insights into their needs and behaviours.

Three: The availability of new technologies that support contextual commerce. These technologies range from smart speakers and messaging apps that can be used to make a purchase by voice command, through to facial recognition such as ‘smile to pay’ and immersive VR and AR platforms with hot spots that customers can click on to purchase items.

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What are the different types of contextual commerce? 

SL: The first is conversational commerce – a way of shopping or purchasing products through chat interfaces that ‘speak’ to people in natural language. This includes the messaging platforms that people already use every day, such as SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat and WeChat, along with messaging services on your brand’s website or mobile app, like live chat.

Voice commerce is still in its early stages but over 25% of US adults already own a smart speaker that they can use to make purchases by voice command. And smart speakers will soon outnumber tablets, with one study predicting that they will grow by 82 percent, from 114 million units globally in 2018 to 207.9 million in 2019.

Even though smart speaker adoption has been slow in Australasia, the opportunity is massive. An Adyen and 451 Research global study says that while more than half (53 percent) of smart speaker owners have used these devices to shop, only 13 percent of retailers currently enable purchases on them. 

The second big opportunity is ‘click to buy’, which removes the shopping cart form and allows people to purchase with one click. It’s included in digital wallets with ‘buy now’ capabilities using common payment apps such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and social media platforms where users can purchase within the app itself (and not on the retailer’s website), like shoppable Instagram. 

Today, 44 percent of consumers already use social media to shop, however, only 18 percent of retailers currently enable purchases on social media (according to the Adyen and 451 Research study). And two in five consumers aged 18-24 say the ability to make purchases via social media would increase their online shopping frequency.

The third opportunity centres on the immersive VR and AR platforms that enable consumers to make a purchase from within the virtual experience. The technologies supporting this include search engines that offer reverse image capability such as Google and TinEye, image recognition technology such as Google Lens, and mobile devices with native support for AR and VR.

AR and VR also improve the online and offline shopping experience, from the pre-purchase phase where people are looking for information, through to purchasing in the store or online, and post-sales services where augmented reality can become an ‘immersive’ assistance service for the user. 

Finally, there’s the Internet of Things (IoT), where consumers can shop through connected devices like smart appliances and smart TVs. 

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Have you introduced any other contextual commerce services at Cue?  

SL: While it’s still early days for Instagram shopping, the opportunity is massive. We’ll add the new ‘checkout’ feature when it becomes available.

Instagram reports that over 130 million consumers tap on a shopping post to learn more about products each month, up from 90 million in September 2018.

We’ve led the market with digital wallets and will continue to add new options as they become available. Cue was the first brand globally to launch Afterpay in stores and one of the first online. We were also the first fashion brand to accept mobile payment platforms Alipay and WeChat Pay in stores, and now accept ApplePay online. 

Style Finder is another example of how we are making commerce fast and easy. We worked with Alibaba Cloud to become the first Australasian fashion brand to give customers a visual search tool using images uploaded from their phone.

The uptake and response to all the new options has exceeded expectations. And the customers who use these new services are spending more and shopping more frequently.

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What are the implementation challenges retailers can expect? 

SL: Contextual commerce is all about getting your retail fundamentals right. Make sure your inventory, feeds, connections and data are all in good shape when you're connecting to these upstream platforms. Create a single source of customer data and inventory, and automate as much as possible.

You’ll need to use APIs to expose data and functions and easily plug in and deploy new services, channels and devices. That will let you implement the new payment options and capabilities as soon as they become available.

And you always have to be thinking about how to provide the best customer experience. It’ll require new processes and solutions to manage the end-to-end process, particularly in a complex, multichannel environment, with services like endless aisle, same day delivery, 30 minute click-and-collect and multiple shipping options.

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What tools or technologies do you recommend?

SL: Fortunately, many of the tools retailers need to create a contextual commerce strategy already exist. The contextual commerce ecosystem ranges from payments across different platforms and new delivery service partnerships through to smart device integrations and geolocation capabilities.

For example, there are conversational commerce platforms (such as Live Person) that can speed up your deployment and ensure you can connect to a growing mesh of customer touchpoints, now and in the future.

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What’s your advice for retailers wanting to know where to start?

SL: You first need to understand how and where your customers want to shop so that you can give them the tools to engage and transact anytime, anywhere.

Look for where you can seamlessly implement purchase opportunities into your customers’ everyday activities, keeping them on their existing devices and touchpoints as they go about their daily activities.

I suggest you start off by focusing on social and conversational commerce, such as live chat, messenger apps, digital wallets and social media platforms to complete the purchase.

If you start now, you’ll capture incremental customers and revenue, generate conversions in new channels and establish a competitive early mover advantage. 

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Cue Clothing is a leader in retail innovation. Read the Cue case study to find out how they’re unleashing seamless new services that deliver extraordinary business outcomes.

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T2 Tea selects Triquestra to unify brand experiences and power global expansion

Premium tea retailer will modernise its retail operations to give customers seamless experiences using our Infinity unified commerce platform

We’re thrilled to announce that Unilever's retail tea business, T2 Tea, has selected Triquestra as its strategic partner for the transformation of its retail system.

T2’s goal is to create immersive and frictionless experiences for customers across online, in-store and mobile channels.

Infinity will be installed as T2’s point of sale with the power to create a central hub for the brand’s inventory and customer loyalty across eCommerce, wholesale and a growing global footprint of over 100 stores across APAC, Europe and North America.

A key factor in T2’s decision was Infinity’s maturity – it’s a proven unified commerce platform that will scale and adapt to shifting consumer expectations and new technologies and give T2 the flexibility to quickly extend support to new stores, channels and markets.

Established in Melbourne in 1996, T2 Tea is a premium tea brand that prides itself on quality products that are beautifully packaged and presented through engaging and immersive in-store experiences. In addition to its global retail outlets, T2 operates a thriving wholesale business selling teas to restaurants, cafes, gourmet food stores and airlines, and has eCommerce channels spanning direct to consumer (t2tea.com), marketplaces and wholesaler third-party sites.

We will support T2 in all areas of retail operations and management, including point of sale, inventory, customer data, order management and loyalty. Infinity will integrate with T2’s other technology solutions, including Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce Commerce Cloud for eCommerce, and HighJump Warehouse Advantage for warehouse management.

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Integration of in-store and online channels

“To keep pace with new technologies and changing consumer demands, we decided to bring everything together with a unified commerce strategy,” says Rohan Penman, T2’s Global Head of Technology.

“Following an in-depth software review process, we selected Triquestra as our strategic partner to help achieve that vision. Triquestra already supports retailers with a strategy of omnichannel innovation and provides best-in-class products and processes, a broad unified commerce portfolio and a referenceable track record of success with multi-store retailers across multiple geographies.

“Infinity will give us a single hub for our channels, reducing integration complexity and manual overheads, while increasing efficiency and accuracy,” Rohan adds. “It will also be our platform for growth and innovation, helping us to deliver evolutionary innovations that will accelerate our business agility and competitive advantage.”

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Immersive and frictionless customer experiences

Our CEO, Kelly Brown, explains: “T2 shares our vision, with a single-minded focus on creating immersive and personalised experiences for customers. It has mastered the art of creating magical in-store experiences, through storytelling and adventurous in-store displays that encourage visitors to discover and experiment.”

“We’re looking forward to supporting T2 in its next phase of growth as the company harnesses new technologies that help to put innovation at the core of everything they do.”

A springboard for innovation

T2’s transition to Infinity will be a phased approach that starts in Australia and New Zealand and extends to Singapore, North America and Europe. Infinity will provide point of sale and a central hub for inventory and customer data to give customers ‘endless aisle’ access to T2’s entire inventory from any channel or touchpoint, as well as new payment options and fulfilment services such as click-and-collect and ship-from-store.

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If you’d like help to unify your brand experiences, get in touch. We’d love to chat about how Infinity can help you create personalised and frictionless experiences for customers across all channels.

Your four stages to unifying customer experiences

If it’s time to make a unified commerce approach a top priority to connect, simplify and innovate, this adoption model can help you build an ecosystem of technologies, tools, processes and experts.

1

Get tight control of your inventory

2

Extend your brand experience across all channels

3

Create delightful, personalised shopping experiences

4

Innovate, innovate, innovate

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Stage 1

Get tight control of your inventory

Ensure you can accurately manage your inventory levels across all your locations and customer touchpoints by centralising your inventory information in near real time. This step is as much about business process, training, discipline and compliance, as it is about the software you install.

With a unified inventory management system in place, you can guarantee you’ve got the right inventory available in each location, without carrying the cost of overstocking. You can also react to trends quickly, and forecast demand based on historical data, sales forecasts and seasonal variations.

See how Night ‘n Day started with inventory to create great customer experiences and increase net profit by around $12,000 a year for each store.

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Stage 2

Extend your brand experience across all channels

Once you’ve got control over your inventory, you’re free to increase your purchasing channels with certainty.

Exposing, rather than replicating, inventory and customer data from your platform to each and every channel means everything stays in sync. Your staff and customers will have consistent product visibility and can expect fluid and accurate interactions, whether in-store, on mobile or online.

And with real-time data on stock levels, you’ll be able to see where inventory is located, find the lowest cost or fastest fulfilment route, and provide better promotions.

Here’s how Cue Clothing is using unified commerce to combine physical and digital channels into a ‘one-brand’ experience.

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Stage 3

Create delightful, personalised shopping experiences

Now it’s time to build genuinely meaningful customer experiences. You need to mix emotional and rational factors to connect and build relationships.

Rational value is the starting point for a great customer experience. It meets each customer’s very logical need for price and product so that they feel they are ‘getting’ value. It’s also the functional experiences you offer, such as convenience, fulfilment, flexibility and speed.

To make customers ‘feel’ valued, you want to tap into aspirational motivations and fulfil their deep, often unspoken needs. Personalised communications, recommendations and offers, rewards for spend and tailored in-store experiences fall into this category and are a great way to surprise and delight – especially if the experience is unexpected.

Here are four ways to create an experience-first future for customer loyalty.

Stage 4

Innovate, innovate, innovate

By using APIs to expose data and functions, and easily plug in and deploy new services, channels and devices, you’ll reduce integration and maintenance overheads, increase real-time accuracy and enjoy virtually limitless scalability and agility.

These improvements in IT efficiency and availability let you shift your team’s priorities to innovation. By using agile methodologies and creating a community of third-party apps and systems working together in an ecosystem, you can drive critical strategic initiatives and continually innovate.

The end result is the ability to create extraordinary customer experiences that help to capture market opportunities, generate additional revenue and build brand advocacy.

See how APIs can help you innovate at pace and build powerful ecosystems to give customers extraordinary experiences.

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Contact us if you have questions or would like advice on any of these unified commerce stages. We can examine your pain points and make recommendations to help you solve problems and find new opportunities that deliver frictionless customer experiences and differentiate your brand.

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For more on unified commerce and why it’s the future of retail, download our ebook.

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APIs and innovation: build your competitive advantage now

Want to increase your pace of innovation?

Giving your customers truly innovative experiences is the fourth step in your unified commerce journey. By this stage, you’ll have centralised your inventory and customer data onto a single platform, you’ll be extending brand experiences across all channels and you’ll be delighting customers with personalised experiences and messages. Next is shifting your team’s priorities to innovation and using APIs for a disruptive competitive advantage.  

The most innovative retailers are creating new business models that are less focused on the store-online-mobile balance and instead concentrate on building ecosystems that give their customers extraordinary experiences.

These retailers have realised that they need to access third-party data and services to successfully give customers what they want at every step of the customer journey. In the past, that required moving a lot of data between systems and possibly even replicating functionality in systems to achieve a consistent outcome.

Now the best retailers are embracing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for efficient and open connectivity between applications, partners and customers. Using APIs, they can expose rather than move or replicate data, and make one set of functions available across various systems without having to recreate it.

APIs are present in every part of our digital world. Every time we use an app like LinkedIn, make a Skype call or listen to Spotify on our phone, we’re using an API.

APIs let you add specialised functionality to a website, application, platform or software without having to write all of the back-end code. By using APIs to access existing solutions in the market, you are free to focus your development efforts on the front-end and create new services that deliver frictionless customer experiences and differentiate your brand.

You can also use APIs to turn your own assets into a platform that can attract partners to build new products and services that bring you both additional revenue. For example, you could release an API that lets developers access your product catalogue to build interesting applications that increase your product exposure.

Here are just some of the ways APIs are enhancing the retail experience:

1

Retail anywhere, any time

APIs let you easily expose your product catalogues and other eCommerce solutions to give customers many more ways to engage with your brand.

Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram have launched APIs that let you sell products on your social pages. For example, Instagram’s shopping feature lets you tag up to five products in organic posts which consumers can then tap on to find out more information and make a purchase.

Using an API like Semantics3, you can connect your product catalogue web pages directly with a global database that shares detailed information such as brand images, product descriptions, product specifications and full product titles. That lets you sell more by creating better product listings and expanding your catalogue and market reach.

2

Voice and visual to boost personalisation

Retailers have long used APIs to personalise their websites and the marketing content they serve up to customers. Site search APIs like Algolia provide advanced search features to help visitors quickly drill down to particular products. Personalisation APIs like RightMessage help you organise your website content to better match the needs of every customer, based on previous visits and buying history. And marketing automation APIs like Emarsys let you suggest products you know they’re interested in.

Visual search APIs are also helping customers quickly find the products they want. The Iconic’s Snap to Shop and Cue Clothing’s Style Finder mobile apps use Alibaba Cloud’s visual search service to retrieve information about products that are similar or identical to an input image. Users can shoot or upload an item of clothing’s photo and each service searches the retailer’s range for similar looking products.

When 50 percent of all searches are predicted to be voice searches by 2020, you can consider using Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant APIs to further tailor the shopping experience and boosts sales.

3

Payment convenience counts

Deregulation of the banking sector and an explosion of new fintech startups is letting consumers shop online using many new payment options and mobile apps.

Payment APIs from PayPal, Stripe, Square and Dwolla not only offer you the technical, fraud prevention and banking infrastructure that’s required to operate online payment systems, they also give consumers innovative digital payment options.

When 25 percent of online shoppers abandon their orders due to frustration with filling in forms, you can offer a digital wallet that lets people transfer their information securely and accurately. These digital wallets are the payment method of choice in mobile-first markets like China.

If you’re selling in China or want to provide frictionless experiences to Chinese visitors, students or ex-pats, then include support for Alipay and WeChat Pay, the dominate digital wallet providers with 92% market share between them.

Consumers also love new ‘buy-now, pay later’ services, particularly millennials with an aversion to credit card debt. APIs let you easily offer pay-later options from providers like Afterpay, Laybuy or PartPay. The benefits can be immediate: Afterpay reports that many retailers have seen customer order sizes jump between 20 to 50 percent and retailers are processing up to 25 percent of online orders through the service.

4

Deliver anywhere, any how

Your order fulfilment process gives you an opportunity to meet customer expectations for faster and cheaper deliveries.

Shipping and delivery APIs let you integrate third party services to automate everything from the sale through to the parcel being delivered to your customer’s address of choice. APIs from Shippit, Temando and Gosweetspot provide one-stop-shop systems to generate a consignment label, ship via the cheapest and fastest delivery service and track your order.

Your customers get the benefit of shipping flexibility, checkout customisation and other functions like tracking notifications and customs forms. And bricks-and-mortar retailers can gain a competitive advantage – for example, fashion retailer Cue Clothing uses its stores as distribution centres for fulfilment options such as 30 minute click-and-collect, store-to-door and 3-hour deliveries nationwide.

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So how do you start making the most of APIs?

Begin by evaluating your company’s value chain. Can you easily integrate and use APIs to access third-party platforms and services to scale your business? Or can you release your own APIs to attract partners and build out your platform? The two options are not mutually exclusive.

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An API-enabled platform like Infinity lets you scale your business quickly by easily adding new apps and services as business requirements change.

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We can also help if you’re looking for advice on how to create a strategy and implement an API programme that quickly creates customer and business value.

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By developing a community of third-party apps and systems working together in an ecosystem, you can reduce integration and maintenance overheads, enjoy virtually limitless scalability, monetise your data and continually innovate.

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Contact us for advice on how to use APIs to achieve greater agility, faster growth and better margins.

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For more on how to give your retail business the flexibility and agility you want, download our ebook.

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