Unified commerce for UK and Irish retailers

Unified commerce is one step up from omnichannel. With unified commerce, data from all your channels and systems feed into one centralised platform for a more unified view of your stock, customers, and payments. This gives you better insights which ultimately leads to better decisions.

Let's look at the core pillars of a successful unified commerce setup. 

Unified commerce core pillars

• Payment processing: A single payment gateway and acquiring network to handle all online, mobile, and in-person transactions.

• Real-time inventory synchronisation: Stock levels need to update automatically across all warehouses and stores the instant a purchase is made on any channel.

• Unified customer profiles: Shopper behaviours and purchase histories link to a single profile, regardless of where or how they buy.

• Consolidated backend reporting: Financial reconciliation and business intelligence are aggregated into one dashboard, removing the need to merge data manually.

Siloed operations stand in the way of growth for many retail and commerce businesses. Unified commerce lets you break through these siloes and let your business reap many benefits. 

Let's dive deeper into how some of the benefits of unified commerce and how they can support your business:

Increase shopper flexibility

Shoppers expect freedom in how they buy, pay, and receive their goods. Unified commerce connects all your channels and backend systems and lets you offer flexible cross-channel experiences. 

The right unified commerce platform will let you easily integrate payment innovations into the customer journey, such as:

• Click and collect: Let shoppers buy online and pick up at a nearby store within hours.

• Mobile point of sale (mPOS): Equip sales associates with mobile point of sale terminals (mPOS) to let shoppers complete a purchase anywhere on the floor.

• Endless aisles: Let in-store shoppers buy out-of-stock items via a terminal or tablet and have them shipped directly to their homes.

• Pay by Link: Convert any chat or social media page into a checkout and let shoppers pay when they are ready using a secure payment link.

Improve shopper loyalty

Building a loyal shopper base requires recognising and rewarding people consistently across all channels. Traditionally, loyalty programs are difficult to manage because in-store and online purchases live in separate databases. 

Unified commerce can connect your loyalty program directly to the shopper's payment method, creating a seamless reward experience regardless of channel.

These are some of the payment technologies that spot repeat shoppers automatically, without compromising shopper security:

• Payment tokenisation: Tokenisation links a unique shopper reference number to the payment card during the first purchase.

• Card-linked loyalty: Automatically award points without requiring physical loyalty cards by linking loyalty to a shopper’s most-used cards.

• Personalised cross-channel offers: Send tailored promotions based on a complete view of the shopper's purchase history across all channels.

Connect data to power growth

Data's a powerful asset, but it's often trapped in separate systems. Unified commerce connects all customer interactions, sales figures, and stock metrics come together in real time. 

Converting raw transactional data into clear insights will remove guesswork and drive data-driven decision-making. 

Data-backed agility will let you implement strong growth strategies:

1. Behavioral marketing: Launch targeted campaigns driven by shopper spending habits, preferred payment methods, and channel affinity. The core of this strategy relies on building a Unified Shopping Profile, which unlocks critical business insights to:

   • Identify and reward high-value customers: Recognise your most loyal shoppers across all touch points to deliver tailored experiences.

   • Optimise catalog decisions: Analyse lifetime purchasing behavior to refine inventory selection and product curation.

   • Structure strategic product bundles: Use historical purchase data to identify natural product affinities for high-converting cross-sells.

2. Automate stock management: Allocate stock based on real-time shopping patterns across storefronts.

3. Regional expansion: Spot high-performing products and payment preferences to guide physical store openings or localised online expansions.

Streamline operations

Employees managing a multi-channel business often have to reconcile accounts, update stock, and manage refunds from siloed backend systems. 

Unified commerce simplifies your operations by replacing fragmented solutions with a single platform. Operational improvements will cut manual labor and the risk of human error to streamline your operations.

Consolidating your sales channels with unified commerce will bring immediate improvements to these operations: 

• Financial reconciliation: Collect online and in-store payment reports into a consolidated report, making financial reconciliation easy with consolidated reporting.

• Simplified refunds: Let customer service teams issue cross-channel refunds, like refunding an online order directly from an in-store cash register.

• Consolidated vendor management: Reduce overhead related to managing multiple contracts and integrations by working with a unified commerce platform.

• Automated stock management: Eliminate manual inventory counts and cross-channel discrepancies by automatically updating a single, centralised stock ledger whenever a sale occurs online or in-store.

• Regional expansion: Standardise and launch new storefronts in minutes using the same operational backend, removing the need to build, test, and maintain unique technical architectures for every local market.

Omnichannel connects all your customer-facing channels, so shoppers can start their journey on one channel and finish on another. For instance, buy a product online and return it in store.

Omni-channel is often built on top of fragmented legacy systems patched together behind the scenes. The main difference is that unified commerce integrates all customer-facing and backend systems.

With unified commerce, the data from all channels feed into one platform, making it easier to spot your customer’s needs and embrace emerging technologies that help you scale your business quickly.

Here’s an overview of the differences between omnichannel and unified commerce strategies:

Unified commerce works by routing all sales, customer, stock, and payment data through a single database and processing platform. When a shopper buys a product, the system instantly processes the payment, updates the stock database, and syncs the customer's profile across all channels. 

Front-of-house channels like mobile apps or POS terminals are aligned with backend systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and warehouse management systems) in real time.

Here’s how unified commerce works in practice:

• Order: A shopper makes the purchase at this touchpoint. This can be online, on mobile, or in-store.

• Pay: The transaction gets processed behind the scenes. The payment gateway processes the payment, while protecting the shopper's card details and linking the purchase to their cross-channel profile.

• Receive: The physical or digital fulfillment of the purchase. The shopper receives their purchase at home, can pick it up from a store, or have an out-of-stock item shipped from another branch.

Unified commerce is valuable for any business that wants to streamline operations and provide customers with cross-channel experiences. Let’s have a look at how unified commerce works for different industries. 

Unified commerce retail

If you’re in retail, unified commerce can take your customer experience to the next level so that you can deliver tailored retail experiences. You can combine a mix of digital and physical while keeping convenience and simplicity central at point of payment. A key aspect of unified commerce in retail is being able to recognise your consumers across channels and tailoring the experience according to their preferences. 

Discover more about how retailers can benefit from unified commerce.

Hospitality five-star experiences 

Hospitality businesses often have separate backend systems and payment providers for each payment channel. This is a significant problem for their payment setups as while guests engage with the hotel on premise and through mobile apps, the payment journeys remain separate and feed into disconnected systems. This often leads to operational hassle, costs, and lost insights for the business, and inconsistent brand experiences for guests.

By unifying all systems into a single platform, hotels can provide their guests with five-star experiences, with data from different departments and properties flowing into one place. This makes it easier to add new channels and connect them to all their payment systems.

Discover more about hospitality businesses can benefit from unified commerce. 

Food and beverage

From bars and pubs to quick service and delivery, the food and beverage (F&B) industry is using unified commerce to enhance the experience for their customers. Businesses take a unified approach to get a better understanding of their customers so that they can offer them the experience they want, whether it’s busting queues through table service or offering them their preferred payment method.

Let’s have a look at how businesses across different industries have succeeded with this.

HUGO BOSS

As customer preferences were changing, HUGO BOSS strived to deliver a seamless shopping experience while ensuring robust security measures across all sales channels.

HUGO BOSS solved this challenge by creating more flexibility in terms of payment options, secure online payments with Visa Network Tokens and 3D Secure, and shopping experiences everywhere through pay-by-link.

Learn how HUGO BOSS is setting a new standard for shopping experiences. 

B&B Hotels

B&B Hotels wanted to grow their business and expand to new markets without compromising on guest experience. 

To accomplish this, they first needed a payment partner that could connect all their systems in one platform. With Unified Commerce, they were able to centralise all their systems in one platform and get a unified understanding of their guests. This allowed them to identify their guests’ preferences, recognise them across channels and locations, and offer personalised payment experiences.

Discover how B&B Hotels are driving business growth through payments. 

On Running

On Running were struggling to understand their customer preferences in the Japanese market. With Adyen’s Unified Commerce solution, On was able to fully integrate their online and offline channels via one platform, delivering a forward-thinking customer journey unique to Japan.

Access more insights into how On is maximising multi-channel retail potential in Tokyo. 

Dominos

In a fast-paced industry where efficiency is paramount, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) such as Domino’s require a payments platform to streamline operations and adapt to evolving customer needs.

By integrating both online and in-store payments into a unified platform, Domino’s can offer a level of service that goes beyond omnichannel sales. This enhancement extends to operational efficiency, decision-making processes, customer loyalty, and staff empowerment.

Understand how Domino’s perfected operational agility with unified commerce.

With Adyen’s unified commerce platform, you can consolidate online, in-app, and in-store payments.

Adyen sits at that moment online, in-store, and across emerging agentic channels. When a customer taps their card, you can recognise who they are at the moment. Instead of relying on a blanket 20% discount, you can use what you know about the customer to offer a relevant reward and apply it as part of the purchase experience.

As a business, you set the strategy, budget, and policies. The difference is that those decisions can be informed by a more connected view of the customer. This gives you more context to optimise for the outcome you choose, whether that’s conversion, margin, lifetime value, or moving the stock you need to sell.

With that context available at the point of purchase, you can connect recognition, loyalty, and payments when the customer is ready to buy.

To help you scale, Adyen provides features to simplify commerce and drive growth:

• Single global platform: Manage global payment processing across multiple channels and regions through one integration and contract.

• Advanced tokenisation: Link payment cards to shopper accounts to power card-linked loyalty programs with tokenisation.

• Real-time reporting: Access consolidated financial reports and shopper insights through an intuitive dashboard.

• Built-in risk management: Protect your business from fraud across channels with automated security tools.

Partnering with Adyen means you can spend less time worrying about backend technology and more time focusing on great customer experiences. Our payments infrastructure supports your growth, helping you convert more shoppers and optimise operations at every stage.

Cut operational silos, drive customer loyalty, and scale with confidence. Get in touch with our team today.