How Australian businesses are driving growth with unified commerce

In today's dynamic business landscape, having adaptable and versatile payment solutions is a cornerstone of success. Changing customer preferences, regulatory mandates, and operational requirements call for a payment solution that can keep pace with your industry and your business.

This is especially true in the current climate of rising inflation, labour shortages, and heightened customer expectations. Today’s decision makers know they need to achieve more with less. Automation, upskilling, and retention are taking top priority. 

This is a key reason why more and more businesses are investing in unified commerce. By connecting their online and offline payments via a single platform, businesses are cutting the complexity of patchwork legacy tech to uncover a host of strategic optimisations. From better cross-channel customer experiences to simplified reconciliation and global growth, the opportunities are expansive.

But what does this look like in action? Let’s take a look at three different Australian businesses – True Alliance, City Beach, ROLLER – that are leveraging Adyen products like unified commerce to simplify existing challenges, streamline operations, and bring speed and scale to their operations.

Since there are few payment partners that have the in-house tech stack to support a truly unified commerce solution, many retailers find themselves dealing with a semi-integrated system of providers for their online and in-person payments.

A leading Australian retail distributor of 23 ecommerce sites, 100 stores, and 19 global brands –  including Lacoste, The North Face, Speedo, and Under Armour –  True Alliance was struggling with just that. With a traditional banking set up and numerous legacy integrations, the company found their payments systems prone to error and increased latency.

With Adyen’s unified commerce solution, True Alliance has been able to cut operational complexity, optimise the checkout experience, and reduce fraud to 0%, enjoying major cost savings in the process.

With everything connected on one platform – and integrated with their Salesforce system — harnessing valuable cross-channel data has also become possible. With real-time shopper insights across channels, True Alliance can plan, personalise, and protect their payments journey better. From marketing to risk management, strategic decision-making is optimised across the board.

Watch the full True Alliance story here

City Beach has been a popular Australian fashion retailer since 1985. Its 60-plus stores bring over 300 surf and skate wear brands to the youth market. Over the past few years, it has launched online stores across Australia, New Zealand, and the US.

The company was looking to future-proof its entire enterprise resource planning (ERP) system across its brick-and-mortar locations and improve its ecommerce proposition. Payments innovation played a central role in driving this vision forward. Key priorities included the ability to add new payment methods efficiently, and provide a smooth payment process via a unified commerce platform. 

Prior to the tech overhaul, City Beach worked with several payment partners servicing various parts of the payment system. As a result, the retailer had limited visibility and control of transactions across different channels. For instance, staff would have to log in to separate accounts with vendors to review and process information. This meant tasks such as reconciliation and refunding took longer. Valuable data on payments trends and customer insights were also distributed across vendors and couldn’t easily be consolidated for analysis. 

By unifying its systems onto a single payments platform with Adyen, City Beach has gained a new level of control and flexibility. It’s now easy to add new payment options, including Buy Now Pay Later, which customers are increasingly adopting across Australia and around the world.

Read the City Beach story here

ROLLER is an all-in-one venue management software platform for modern attractions like Skyline (Singapore), American Dream (USA), and Ninja Warrior (UK). The software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform supports over 750 attractions worldwide with their sales, guest services, and attraction management needs – and serves a guest interaction every tenth of a second. 

With each attraction boasting high foot traffic and constant guest movement, it's essential for ROLLER to ensure a seamless experience at every touchpoint. While working with third-party providers that controlled the onboarding process, ROLLER's customers often faced delays in setting up and processing payments.

Through Adyen’s unified commerce solution, ROLLER enabled their customers to actively reduce friction at every guest touchpoint. The platform went from offering 3 payment methods to 38, empowering guests to pay however they want to.

Additionally, real-time insights from a consolidated payments setup help ROLLER and their customers have a more complete view of the business. Insights from the payment flow help ROLLER's customers better understand their guests' behaviours and optimise sales strategy. This leads to smoother guest journeys with increased conversions and spend.

See the full ROLLER story here

As we’ve seen, finding a payments solution that can easily flex and grow with industry demands, customer needs, and growth ambitions, can have long-lasting benefits. Whether it’s handling a multichannel integration, adding new payment methods, gaining cross-channel customer insights, or driving global growth, unified commerce can give you that agility and control.