EMARKETER projects that consumer spending during the 2024 holiday season will reach $1.353 trillion, a 4.8% increase from 2023. In our latest webinar, we discussed strategies for enhancing in-store experiences through digital features, essential unified commerce functionalities and the benefits of mobile app commerce. All of these tactics will help your brand boost sales for the upcoming holiday season.
What we learned:
- How to adapt to changing customer expectations
- Boosting sales with effective omnichannel retail strategies
- How industry leaders develop unified commerce
- Main differences between unified commerce and omnichannel strategies
- Challenges of unified commerce for industry leaders
Speakers:
- Trang To, Vice President, Omni at Tapestry
- Jillian Gorman, Head of E-Commerce Experience at Samsung Electronics America
- Kent Zimmerman, VP, eCommerce & Marketing Technology at Shoe Carnival
- Matt Dunphy, Lead Solutions Engineer at commercetools
- Linda Sasso, Senior Director, Digital Engagement at EPAM
- Veronika Sonsev, Co-Founder at CommerceNext
Watch the replay here or read the recap below.
How to Adapt to Changing Customer Expectations
To adapt to evolving customer expectations in a fast-changing marketplace, businesses need to invest in a more seamless, connected experience. While smaller startups can quickly adjust to new opportunities, larger companies with older systems often struggle to meet modern shopper demands. By focusing on improving the overall customer experience, businesses can see real success, as 83% of customers now value the experience just as much as the product. Many customers research both online and in-store, especially for items like clothing, furniture and groceries. Additionally, with the rise of conveniences like curbside pickup during COVID, businesses should continue to offer such services to meet these newer expectations.
Boosting Sales with Effective Omnichannel Retail Strategies
Omnichannel retail is a familiar concept, but implementing it can be challenging for businesses using outdated tools. A key benefit of this approach is the ability to show local inventory and pricing on websites, boosting customer confidence in-store and often increasing purchases. To start, businesses should centralize product data, such as inventory and pricing, into a fast, connected system, which streamlines the shopping experience and reduces costs. Next, integrating customer data enables more personalized shopping experiences. By connecting these aspects, businesses can offer tailored options that engage customers and drive innovation.
How Industry Leaders Develop Unified Commerce
Samsung is still growing its DTC ecommerce capabilities, with its unified commerce approach continuing to evolve. The company is excited to expand with key retail partners, including new strategic partnerships that showcase its innovative products in stores. Samsung is also exploring data integration for future growth and focusing on improving customer experiences through next-day fulfillment, app updates and loyalty programs.
Shoe Carnival is making great progress toward unified commerce, building on its strong omnichannel foundation. With 430 stores, they made it easy for customers to view in-store inventory while shopping online or in person. This led to improvements like BOPUS and ship-from-store, which they’ve been doing for almost 10 years. They also worked to align pricing and promotions so shoppers have a better experience. Now, Shoe Carnival is focusing on being more customer-friendly, using CRM to send unified messages and make shopping easy, whether online or in-store.
Tapestry is committed to creating a flexible shopping experience that allows customers to browse, shop and purchase in the way that suits them best. Since half of shopping journeys start on one device and end on another, Tapestry understands how fluid customer behavior can be. That’s why they offer access to their “endless aisle” in both retail and outlet stores, along with easy payment options and convenient in-store pickup and returns.
Main Differences Between Unified Commerce and Omnichannel Strategies
EPAM highlights the differences between unified commerce and omnichannel strategies. Omnichannel connects various sales channels but relies on separate systems, which can create inefficiencies. Unified commerce brings everything together through a centralized platform, enabling real-time data flow and focusing on a customer-friendly experience. Unified commerce simplifies things and ensures that information is synchronized, making it easier for customers to make quick purchasing decisions.
Challenges of Unified Commerce for Industry Leaders
Initially, Shoe Carnival struggled with data stored in silos and attempted to make all product, transaction and customer information available across channels without fully understanding its relevance. This led to a complicated system. To resolve these issues, Shoe Carnival revamped its data architecture, adopting a single platform as the main source for customer data. By integrating only the essential data for analytics and marketing, the company simplified its processes and improved its ability to leverage valuable customer insights
Tapestry has encountered challenges related to converting rich data into actionable insights rather than issues with data complexity and accuracy. The company has a unified database that brings together customer, product and marketing information, but the challenge lies in effectively using this data. They spend about 80% of their time figuring out what has happened, leaving only 20% for the crucial “so what”, understanding the implications and making changes.
For more tips like these, sign up for the 2025 CommerceNext Growth Show, taking place in NYC on June 24-26, 2025. Sign up s here.
