At Visualsoft’s recent event, sync, one of the key themes was how retailers can simplify complexity without losing the human touch. In a session led by Matthias Kleven, Head of Northern European Partnerships at Shopify, the discussion turned to unified commerce and how it’s quietly redefining what ‘connected retail’ really means.
Today’s consumers expect to move seamlessly between channels, touchpoints and devices. They want the same level of service, personalisation and speed everywhere. For retailers, delivering that consistency requires more than omnichannel coordination; it demands genuine integration across every part of the business.
Below are five lessons from the discussion that show how unified commerce is enabling retailers to work smarter, innovate faster and stay resilient in a volatile market.
1. Efficiency is the new competitive advantage
In a market defined by tight margins and rising costs, efficiency is power. Retailers that unify sales channels, inventory, and data are able to reduce manual work, speed up decisions, and reinvest time into customer experience.
Shopify POS is built directly into the wider commerce platform, allowing retailers to unify data across all locations and reduce the friction that comes with disconnected systems. It achieves implementation times up to 20% faster than competitors, with retailers saving an average of five hours per month on manual reconciliation.
Brands like Orlebar Brown have shown that simplifying systems isn’t just an IT win. It can drive measurable commercial impact, from cutting costs to improving conversion rates.
Orlebar Brown’s adoption of Shopify POS shows the commercial impact of simplicity: a 50% drop in total cost of ownership, a 66% lift in checkout conversions, and 42% of customers identified as Shop Pay users. Efficiency isn’t just a systems upgrade; it’s a profit driver.
2. Growth at scale
Retail growth no longer comes from adding more stores or systems, but from integrating what already exists. Shopify’s unified customer, product, and order data helps marketing and operations teams work from a single source of truth, enabling smarter decisions and seamless scalability.
Shopify Markets, for instance, allows retailers to localise buyer experiences and manage global operations from one place. This centralised approach allows brands to expand internationally while keeping control of complexity and cost.
Once efficiency is achieved, scale follows. Having a single customer view allows marketing teams to build targeted campaigns in real time, while Shopify Markets supports international expansion without adding complexity.
It means retailers can enter new regions, open stores, or launch new sales channels seamlessly, with growth as a natural extension of their core operations.
3. Innovation on autopilot
Retail innovation has often been seen as reactive, but unified commerce allows it to become part of the everyday rhythm of business. Shopify Editions, released twice a year, deliver new features across retail, B2B and omnichannel experiences, giving brands constant access to tools that keep them ahead of market shifts.
For example, Represent’s experience illustrates the payoff: after launching localised sites for the US and Europe, the brand saw a 50% rise in international sales, 100%+ growth in organic traffic, and an 8x increase in conversions during Black Friday. Innovation becomes continuous rather than episodic.
4. Test, tweak, scale
Flexibility is key to staying competitive. Unified commerce creates the foundation for experimentation. With a single data view and modular architecture, retailers can test new concepts, measure outcomes, and scale successful ideas quickly.
Waterdrop, for example, leveraged Shopify’s APIs and Markets tools to expand into 30 countries, achieving a 40% average annual growth rate while maintaining 100% uptime during peak traffic. This ability to test and iterate at pace helps brands remain agile in unpredictable trading conditions.
5. Building future-ready retail
Perhaps the biggest lesson is that unified commerce isn’t just another retail strategy, it’s the foundation of future-ready businesses. By consolidating customer, product, and order data into one platform, retailers can turn complexity into opportunity.
As Kleven summarised at Sync, the winners will be those who make technology invisible, creating experiences so seamless that customers only notice the brand, not the process behind it.
Ultimately, unified commerce is not only a technology strategy but a mindset. It’s about building organisations that are flexible, transparent, and designed to adapt. By connecting every part of the operation through a single platform, retailers can remove friction and respond faster to customer needs.
The bottom line:
Retailers are facing tough conditions, but the path forward is clear. By prioritising efficiency, unlocking growth, and embedding constant innovation, unified commerce can transform retail from reactive firefighting into a proactive engine for long-term success.
