How retailers can make stores the center of unified commerce

Visit Primark’s Birmingham High Street store and you will see the reality of fashion retail’s transformation with your own eyes. Alongside shoppers browsing racks of clothes and trying on new season items are groups of friends socialising in Primark’s Disney-branded café and getting lunch in the in-store Greggs bakery. There are click-and-collect centers for conveniently picking up online orders, returns hubs to refund unwanted items, and social media “moments” that encourage online sharing – Primark has nearly 11 million followers on Instagram. The retailer’s Beauty Studios area is full of shoppers testing out make up products, while others are queuing for Smokey Barbers haircuts and other in-store treatments.

While so called experiential retail is not new, today’s most successful stores blend the experience, entertainment and community-building elements with convenience services and omnichannel touch points to transform the shopping experience. They are wired with tech that connects inventory across channels and puts power into the hands of store staff.

This is the “store of the future”, today.

“Nowadays, the biggest opportunity for fashion brands and retailers is to leverage the store for more than just its selling space,” agrees Nikki Baird, vice president of strategy and product at retail enterprise solution provider Aptos. “We used to think of stores as end points for consumers, but now they must become nodes on the omnichannel customer journey. The store must become an event space, a customer service hub and a fulfilment centre. And for brands and retailers to make that transformation, they need to put the store at the centre of a unified commerce approach.”

Staffing the retail transformation

While shoppers might be craving these convenience-driven, community-minded experiences IRL (in real life) via transformed bricks-and-mortar stores, brands and retailers need store staff that are able to deliver on customers’ ever-increasing expectations. Just as the role of traditional shops is evolving and creating challenges for fashion businesses, the demands on store staff and their responsibilities are also being reshaped. This is posing a further problem for brands and retailers.

Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic have also not helped, notes Zaki Hassan, general manager, EMEA and APAC, at Aptos: “We’ve seen a big exit from the workforce and many of those people didn’t come back to retail. There is an ongoing labour crunch that has really hit the retail industry hard.”

To deliver on customer expectations while attracting and retaining staff, fashion business leaders need to rethink their approach by unifying their operations and simultaneously enabling their staff by giving them the tools, tech, skills and knowledge to deliver.

Introducing unified commerce

Put simply, unified commerce is a retail strategy focused on connecting customers to products.

“Not just the consumer-facing commerce side, but also the behind-the-scenes, inventory side,” says Baird. “It’s everything you need to do to connect shoppers to the products they want, wherever the shopper may be.”

In Baird’s view, this approach is a nuanced development of the “single view of stock” strategy that some brands and retailers have been focused on in recent years.

“The concept of achieving a single view of all your stock sounds great, but the reality of what you need to get a handle on is not just what stock you have, but what inventory you can access, and what status that inventory is in, and the combination of those become very powerful.”

This means you can know what stock you have so you can sell it to a customer in store, but also to a customer shopping online, in real time. But you can also know the status of items being returned and the timings of their availability so you can sell that stock and promise it to a new customer.

“Getting down to the granularity of inventory is vitally important,” says Baird.

Sounds simple, but it can be very difficult for brands and retailers to achieve this, particularly those with legacy systems.

“Real-time speed is probably the biggest challenge,” Baird says. “When you have older systems that run batch processes and are updating overnight, there can be a lot of difference between your merchandising systems and your order management system.”

“Businesses have also made a lot of investment into existing technology, so it’s not possible for them to rip and replace every piece of tech they have,” adds Hassan. “The key is trying to understand what’s the priority, what can be replaced and what can be done so they see incremental value.”

Finding one solution

Aptos One, a unified commerce platform, is a mobile-first, cloud-native POS (point-of-sale) solution. It aims to unify in-store and online interactions. Its omnichannel capabilities help to ensure that every customer touchpoint is informed and consistent, whether it is managing returns, fulfilling online orders in store, or accessing enterprise-wide inventory data. By unifying frontend and backend systems, Aptos One gives store staff the knowledge and power to transform omnichannel shopping experiences.

Brands and retailers including New Balance, Michael Kors and The North Face have unified their operations with the technology.

“Simplification is the main benefit,” says Baird of Aptos One. “It really does simplify the technology footprint in the store, both in terms of the devices themselves – it’s a tablet, not a big, clunky machine – but also behind the scenes and connecting products to shoppers. It’s a lot simpler not having to directly manage and monitor the data flow.”

“Fortune favours the bold,” says Hassan. “Since Covid-19, I think a lot of retailers have been slow to make investments and have been a bit fearful of what’s going to happen next. But businesses that take that first leap with technology have a chance to get ahead of the competition and be the leaders in their space.”