Unified commerce platform: how to choose one for your business

TL;DR

• A unified commerce platform is a single system that lets you run all your commerce operations on one shared source of truth.
• Core components of a unified commerce platform include ecommerce, POS, search and merchandising, marketing automation, and support software – all operating on a shared data model.
• Retailers adopting unified commerce report 3x revenue growth, 1.7x higher customer lifetime value, and 31% lower fulfillment costs.
• Most unified commerce platform fall short because they rely on integrations rather than native unification, resulting in data silos, real-time gaps, and fragmented experiences.
• A true unified commerce platform should offer a single data model, real-time inventory, unified customer profiles, operational efficiency, and the ability to scale easily.
• Maropost enables unified commerce by natively bringing ecommerce, POS, marketing, merchandising, and customer support together in one connected platform.

Let’s face it, customer expectations have changed dramatically over the recent years. Today’s buyers move between online stores, physical locations, marketplaces, social channels, and support touchpoints – and they want a seamless experience at every step. No wonder many businesses are turning to unified commerce platforms.

With a unified commerce solution, you can run your entire commerce ecosystem from a single platform. No need to manage dozens of poorly integrated (or worse, completely disconnected) tools.  And most ecommerce and retail business owners agree that unified commerce brings undeniable benefits. According to the 2025 Retail Capability Index report, retailers that embrace unified commerce see 3x revenue growth, 1.7x higher customer lifetime value, and 31% lower fulfillment costs.

But the reality is that not all unified commerce platforms are as unified as they claim to be. So how do you choose a truly unified commerce platform for your business? In this blog, we’ll take a look at what a unified commerce platform really is, its core components, and what you need to consider to choose the right solution for your business.

What is a unified commerce platform?

A unified commerce platform is a single software system that brings together all core commerce functions – including ecommerce, point of sale (POS), inventory, order management, marketing, merchandising, customer data, and support – into one centralized platform with a shared data model.

So, instead of connecting multiple tools through loose integrations, a unified commerce platform operates on one source of truth, i.e., a single database for products, inventory, orders, and customers.

As a result, businesses can reduce operational complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO), as a unified commerce platform eliminates the need to manage multiple systems that often operate in silos. But most importantly, that enables businesses to deliver truly connected, seamless experiences no matter where and how their customers shop.

And based on a Bain and Aptos study, nearly 100% of retailers believe that a well-executed unified commerce strategy enables:

• Improved cross-channel customer experiences
• More reliable inventory management
• Higher conversion rates
• Larger purchase sizes
• Increased upselling and cross-selling
• Reduced lost sales
• Greater ability to attract new customers
• Higher customer loyalty
• Improved employee experience
• Lower operating costs

Recommended reading: What is unified commerce? A complete 2026 guide

What does the experience look like for customers and teams using a unified commerce platform?

Let’s take a look at what the experience looks like in practice for both shoppers and internal teams:

• Reliable real-time inventory sync: Inventory levels are updated in real-time across all channels (in-store, online, and marketplaces) so your team doesn’t have to deal with overselling and frustrated customers.
• Consistent pricing and promotions: Price changes, discounts, and promotions are applied automatically everywhere – no manual updates, no mismatched offers, no customer confusion.
• Connected cross-channel carts: Cart follow the customer – shoppers can add items to their shopping cart in one channel and complete their purchase on another without losing their selections and having to start over again.
• Buy online – pick up in-store (BOPIS): Shoppers can make a purchase online and pick up their order in a nearly store instead of waiting for delivery, while fulfillment automatically coordinates in real time.
• Effortless cross-channel returns: Shoppers can return online purchases at any brick-and-mortar location, with inventory, refunds, and order status automatically synchronized across all systems.
• Unified loyalty and rewards: Shoppers can earn and redeem loyalty points seamlessly across every touchpoint, while the platform keeps balances and reward activity updated everywhere in real time.
• Better personalization: Marketing, merchandising, and service teams can deliver more relevant messages, offers, and recommendations by using real-time data from every customer interaction.
• Single customer profile: All customer data (including purchases, preferences, loyalty activity, and support history) is stored in one unified profile, giving your teams instant access to a complete customer view.

5 Core components of a unified commerce platform

A truly unified commerce platform brings together five key components that operate on a shared data model:

1. Ecommerce software:

The ecommerce component powers your digital storefronts and enables you to sell your products online through your website and marketplaces. It manages every aspect of your ecommerce operations, including product catalogs, inventory, pricing, promotions, checkout, order processing, and payments.

The ecommerce software also consolidates customer data, purchase history, and shopper preferences. This is the key part of the unified commerce platform.

2. Point of sale (POS) software:

If you sell through brick-and-mortar locations in addition to online channels, a unified commerce platform helps you manage your retail operations through the Point of Sale (POS) software. It processes in-store transactions and enables options like endless aisle selling, buy online-pick up in store (BOPIS), and cross-channel returns.

On top of that, it provides store associates with real-time access to inventory, customer profiles, order history, and loyalty balances to help them personalize interactions.

3. Search and merchandising software:

Search and merchandising software enables you to better control how your products are presented and discovered by your online shoppers. With AI-powered site search, dynamic product displays, smart collections, and relevant product recommendations based on browsing and purchasing behavior, the software makes product discovery more effortless and helps shoppers find what they’re looking for faster.

With search and merchandising software, you can boost your website conversions and increase average order values.

4. Marketing automation software:

With marketing automation software, you can orchestrate cross-channel campaigns across email, SMS, and other digital channels. It lets you build automated journeys for acquisition, cart abandonment, retention, re-engagement, and other types of campaigns.

In a unified commerce platform, marketing automation operates on comprehensive customer data, ensuring that your messages are highly relevant and personalized, while offers and product recommendations are aligned with current inventory, pricing, and customer behavior.

5. Customer support software:

Lastly, customer support software is the final piece of the unified commerce puzzle. When customer support software is part of the unified commerce platform, it gives support agents instant access to a complete view of each customer’s profile, including purchase history, returns, loyalty activity, and previous interactions.

That enables support teams to provide efficient and personalized support and resolve issues on the spot, without switching between systems. Better yet, they can drive additional revenue through cross-selling and upselling, turning support interactions into sales moments.

Download: The unified commerce playbook

Where most unified commerce platforms fall short today

Ideally, a unified commerce platform should natively include all the core components we’ve listed above, but in reality, that is not always the case.

Though many platform position themselves as “unified commerce,” most actually rely on separate systems connected though integrations rather than a truly unified architecture. Ecommerce, POS, marketing, merchandising, and support often run on different databases that don’t sync in real time.

Ultimately, that creates data silos, delayed updates, and inconsistent information across channels. So, in practice, many “unified commerce” platforms behave more like traditional omnichannel setups or simply integrated solutions with surface-level connectivity. Here’s what happens as a result:

• Inventory lag: Inventory may appear online when it’s already sold-out in-store, which results in overselling, cancelled orders, and frustrated customers.
• Inconsistent pricing: Discounts and price changes fail to sync across channels in real time, leading to mismatched offers online, in-store, and at checkout.
• Disconnected carts and checkout experiences: Shoppers cannot carry their cart or preferences across channels, having to start over when they switch.
• Limited fulfillment flexibility: Options like BOPIS or cross-channel returns become difficult to execute reliably, which can hurt customer experience.
• Delayed marketing triggers: Marketing teams often can’t trigger timely campaigns (like abandoned cart or replenishment messages) because customer actions aren’t captured in real time.
• Manual operational workarounds: Because systems don’t stay in sync, teams spend time fixing data issues manually, leading to more mistakes and higher operating costs.
• Slower customer support resolution: Support agents may need to switch between multiple systems to access full order and interaction history, resulting in loner resolution times.

Recommended reading: Omnichannel vs. unified commerce: the real difference explained

How to choose a unified commerce platform: key factors to consider

With multiple unified commerce solutions on the market, how do you choose the right one for your business? More importantly, how do you know whether a solution is truly unified or just a ‘Frankenstack’ of poorly integrated systems? Here’s what you should pay attention to when evaluating different vendors:

• Single source of truth: First things first, ask the vendor: "Is there one database for all channels, or do you sync data between different modules?" A true unified commerce platform is built on one shared data model for customers, inventory, orders, pricing, and promotions, while a Frankenstack relies on synchronization between separate databases.
• Real-time inventory and flexible fulfilment: Next, the platform should provide real-time inventory visibility across all your channels and locations and support flexible fulfillment options (like BOPIS, ship-from-store, and cross-channel returns without relying on complex integrations.
• The 360-degree customer profile: This one is critical: a unified commerce platform should provide a single customer profile that consolidates all the information about the customer. That includes their purchase history, loyalty activity, browsing behavior and support interactions. No scattered customer data across different systems and no duplicate customer profiles.
• Operational simplicity: Implementing a unified commerce platform should help you reduce the number of tools your teams have to manage. Because the primary goal of a unified platform is to shrink your existing tech stack. With a unified commerce solution, you aren’t managing 10 different vendor relationships, you’re basically managing one.
• Scalability: Last but not least, when you open your 50th location, expand into a new country, or want to add a new digital channel, the platform should scale easily as your business grows. And it doesn’t mean that you will have to replatform, rebuild your entire tech stack, or introduce additional systems just to support growth.

How Maropost enables unified commerce in a single platform

At Maropost, we genuinely believe that unified commerce is the future of retail and ecommerce. Merchants are tired of having to manage dozens of disjointed systems just to keep their operations up and running. With a unified commerce platform, they can significantly reduce the number of tools they need, lower operational costs, and actually improve sales.

If you’re ready to finally ditch your fragmented tech stack and switch to a unified commerce solution, here’s what Maropost’s platform offers:

• Ecommerce software: lets you build storefronts with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder and manage inventory, massive product catalogs (up to 1mln SKUs), orders, prices, and promotions.
• Point of sale software (POS)*: Enables you to manage retail store operations while keeping orders, inventory levels, shipping, and returns perfectly in sync with your ecommerce operations.
• Search and merchandising software: Helps you drive more ecommerce sales through improved site search, product discovery, and product recommendations based on behavior, browsing history, and purchasing data.
• Marketing automation software: Lets you run cross-channel marketing campaigns across email and SMS, ensuring the right messages are delivered to the right people at the right time based on their journey stage and engagement.
• Customer support software: Empowers you to support customers across multiple channels and deliver 24/7 automated assistance with a conversational AI chatbot purpose-built for ecommerce businesses.

Book a demo of the Maropost Unified Commerce platform to see it in action and discover what’s possible for your business when your sales channels and back-end systems operate on a single source of truth.

* Coming soon

Frequently asked questions

What are the benefits of using a unified commerce platform?

Key benefits of using a unified commerce platform include:

• More consistent customer experience: Customers can seamlessly switch between channels and still get the same frictionless experience no matter how they shop.
• Deeper personalization: With more holistic customer data, you can deliver more relevant offers, product recommendations, and messages based on real customer behavior.
• Better inventory management: Real-time inventory sync across all channels helps you avoid overselling, reduce unexpected stockouts, and make smarter fulfillment decisions.
• Unified customer profiles: With a unified commerce platform, every purchase, interaction, and support ticket is captured in a single customer profile, giving you a deeper understanding of your customers.
• More sales revenue: With better customer experiences and personalization, you can drive higher conversion rates, larger average order values, and increased sales revenue.
• Lower total cost of ownership: Running your entire commerce ecosystem on one platform reduces integration work, manual processes, and ongoing maintenance, lowering total cost of ownership.

How can unified commerce help reduce operational costs?

Unified commerce helps reduce operational costs by bringing ecommerce, POS, merchandising, marketing, and support into one platform and eliminating the need to use multiple disconnected systems. With a single unified commerce solution, you spend less time and money on custom integrations, data syncing, and manual reconciliation between tools. According to Shopify, companies using unified commerce platforms report a 22% reduction in total cost of ownership compared to businesses relying on multi-vendor systems.

What’s the difference between omnichannel and unified commerce?

Omnichannel commerce focuses on delivering consistent experiences for customers by integrating multiple sales channels, but those often operate separately, creating data silos. Unified commerce natively integrates all front-end and back-end systems and enables businesses to manage all their commerce operations from a single platform. Unified commerce is a step forward, delivering value where omnichannel commerce falls short. Here’s how they differ:

• Technology stack: Omnichannel relies on multiple separate systems connected through integrations, while unified commerce runs on a single, centralized platform.
• Data foundation: In an omnichannel setup, data is often siloed by channel and requires syncing, while unified commerce uses a single source of truth with real-time data access.
• Customer experience: Omnichannel delivers consistency but can introduce friction, while unified commerce enables a truly connected customer experience across all channels.
• Implementation: Omnichannel is easier to implement, while unified commerce requires more upfront effort but delivers long-term efficiency.
• Cost implications: Omnichannel incurs higher ongoing integration and maintenance costs, while unified commerce lowers total cost of ownership over time.