Unified Commerce: smart architecture for all your shop concepts

Shops come in many shapes and sizes, from mobile pop-up stores to XL flagship stores. Different concepts allow retailers to optimally respond to the specific needs of their customers. However, these concepts do place specific demands on your infrastructure and IT architecture. Smart architecture provides support in every situation. In this blog series, we consider the key role of flexibility in retail. We present five essential guidelines, the third of which we will discuss below.

Retail concepts

Retailers are increasingly experimenting with various retail concepts to meet the changing expectations of consumers and to respond to diverse customer needs. Each concept brings its own challenges:

Pain point: single architecture

In practice, many retailers use different POS solutions for different store concepts, or they make the necessary concessions. This has to do with the supply side of the market: many POS providers have opted for a single architecture, focused on the retail sector(s) that are most important to them. For example, they may have started out with a supermarket as a customer, which means they work with a store server as standard. Other retail customers of such a POS provider are dependent on that one architecture and they also experience its limitations; new store concepts may require a cloud solution, a mobile-first approach or a hybrid model, but the POS provider cannot provide for this. And so the retailer who still wants to introduce a new concept needs a separate system in addition to the existing POS solution.

But additional solutions lead to complex integrations and a fragmented IT landscape, which increases management costs and detracts from the customer experience. As a retailer, you don’t want to be held back by monolithic architectures these days. You want to be able to switch gears quickly.

Solution: choose per store concept

Enactor supports all store concepts without you having to make concessions as a retailer. This Unified Commerce solution, with which Ctac collaborates, offers you a choice per concept. You can adjust the set-up to the type of store and to local circumstances. This prevents you from having to use different POS solutions or incurring unnecessary costs for a shop server, for example.

Specifically

With Enactor, you are ready for a range of shop concepts. The MACH technology has various deployment options. You can opt for a large resilient set-up, which works with shop servers for the best performance and offline availability. Or for a fully cloud-based shop that can run anywhere there is a network. This solution is ideal for a travelling tailor who sells from people’s homes using a smartphone, or for a temporary pop-up store that needs to be up and running quickly. Enactor also offers support for all intermediate concepts and situations, even a mix of retail and hospitality.

Conclusion: good architecture is flexible

The future of retail requires an IT architecture that is not only robust, but also extremely flexible. By investing in a smart architecture, retailers can respond quickly to new trends and customer needs, without technological obstacles. With Unified Commerce, you can adapt existing retail models and quickly launch new concepts, such as a city store next to your existing XL shops or a temporary concept store in a new country to explore sales opportunities. Flexible architecture sets you free.