Best Practices for Achieving a Unified Commerce Strategy

As organizations attempt to keep pace with rising consumer expectations, their commerce ecosystem and ancillary systems are becoming increasingly complex. There are more purchasing channels, more systems and more data to manage than ever before. Because of this, many of our clients are turning to a unified commerce strategy to reduce this complexity, streamline their customer experience (CX), gain operational efficiency and drive growth.

However, the journey to a unified commerce strategy isn't without challenges. From strategy to execution, we've helped many leaders navigate the stumbling blocks that can occur related to people, processes and technologies. Obstacles like legacy systems, costly third-party platforms, competing departmental priorities, change management and a lack of a mature data strategy can slow or completely halt progress. 

While these challenges may be unavoidable, there are ways to overcome them faster. Based on our experience helping clients across industries, we've identified these unified commerce best practices to help you ensure a smooth transition and make the right decisions faster. 

Best Practice #1: Develop a clear vision of the customer and agent journey. 

Set your current commerce limitations aside. In an ideal world, how do you want customers — and the AI agents increasingly acting on their behalf — to engage with your organization? From beginning to end, what do these experiences look like?

Customer journey mapping has long been the foundation of a sound CX strategy, and it remains essential. But today's mapping exercise needs to account for a new kind of shopper: AI agents. According to a 2026 IBM Institute for Business Value and National Retail Federation study of 18,000 global consumers, nearly half already turn to AI for help during their buying journeys — researching products, interpreting reviews and hunting for deals. These agents don't browse the way humans do — they query, compare, validate inventory and attempt to complete purchases programmatically. If your commerce environment has disconnects that a human can intuitively work around, an AI agent will simply stop.

We recommend starting this exercise by identifying your goals across both journeys. For your customers, these might include increasing online cart size, trip frequency, basket margins and inventory visibility; integrating loyalty platforms; and creating personalized experiences. For agent-driven journeys, the questions shift: Can an AI agent find and understand your products? Can it check accurate inventory in real time? Can it complete a transaction without hitting a dead end? Mapping both journeys in parallel will surface the gaps in how your product content, inventory systems and commerce channels communicate with each other, so you know where friction lives before you start building.

Best Practice #2: Know your environment.

You can't unify your environment if you don't know what's in it and how everything fits together. We recommend conducting an audit of your technologies before implementing anything new. 

This information will allow you to streamline, simplify and rationalize your existing tools so you have a clear picture of your architecture and systems. It will also help you prioritize your unified commerce roadmap, set realistic timelines and understand the true cost of your transformation. 

For example, you might find that your legacy systems are too costly to retire or too deeply intertwined with your infrastructure to replace. We've helped many clients identify alternative solutions that allow them to continue using their legacy systems while extracting the data they need to achieve a more unified commerce stack. Knowing this information upfront allows leaders to avoid surprises, create budgets and ensure they have the right IT resources for the job.

Best Practice #3: Solidify your data strategy. 

The most foundational element of your unified commerce strategy is your approach to data.  

Many times, when we talk with clients who are ready to proceed with a unified commerce strategy, they've already missed an important step: developing a well-defined data governance strategy.

Data governance and data hygiene are prerequisites for establishing a unified commerce strategy. Implementing a holistic data governance strategy ensures your organization operates with clean, high-quality data necessary for unifying systems, processes and technologies. Do not postpone or ignore this work. It will only complicate matters later by making it harder to pinpoint data sources. You also run the risk of duplicating data points, which can distort insights and become difficult to sort out later.

As AI becomes a more active participant in the shopping journey, your data must also be structured and descriptive enough for AI systems to understand and act on. Consider your product data: Does it include the attributes, context and detail an AI agent would need to accurately describe, compare and recommend your products? If a customer relies on an AI assistant for a recommendation and your product information is incomplete or inconsistently formatted, your products may not surface at all. Building toward structured, AI-ready data is part of what a strong data strategy looks like today — and it starts with the same governance disciplines you're already implementing.

Ensuring your data is accurate and consistent before embarking on a unified commerce strategy is key to extracting valuable insights faster, preventing future headaches, and building the right foundation for AI and innovation. 

Best Practice #4: Consider the impact on the employee experience. 

Your people are at the core of every digital transformation — including the unification of your commerce strategy. Their support and engagement are critical for maintaining momentum, enriching the customer experience and successfully achieving your strategy. 

For knowledge workers — merchandisers, analysts, marketing and ecommerce teams — unifying systems means new workflows, new tools and a fundamentally different relationship with data. For frontline store associates, it can mean changes to how they process transactions, check inventory, fulfill orders and assist customers across channels. Both groups bring valuable perspectives on where friction exists today, and both need to be brought along intentionally.

Talk to employees across these roles about how new systems will change their day-to-day responsibilities. Understand their perspective on where updates are most needed and allow time for technology adoption and genuine proficiency. This is especially important as organizations increasingly implement AI-assisted capabilities — from inventory intelligence to customer service tools — that extend what employees can see and do. Investing in that readiness, not just the technology rollout, is what separates organizations that sustain momentum from those that stall after go-live.

This is also a good opportunity to gather feedback that can influence the prioritization of your unified commerce roadmap. By taking these steps, you can develop a robust change management strategy that addresses the impact of unified commerce on the employee experience (EX) and enables you to balance both EX and CX.

Best Practice #5: Foster organizational alignment. 

Unified commerce touches many teams within an organization. Aligning these stakeholders will accelerate progress, maximize ROI and ensure long-term success. 

Start by bringing together marketing, product, operations, IT, ecommerce and customer service stakeholders to identify their specific goals and objectives. Understanding these goals will allow you to build a strategy that keeps everyone engaged and delivers the most value. 

This group of stakeholders must work together to build alignment, prioritize the unified commerce roadmap and identify quick wins that will immediately impact the business. These insights can also be used to shape a phased implementation approach, with each stakeholder having complete visibility into what's coming next. 

Clients who successfully achieve unified commerce are intentional about building organizational alignment and creating a shared vision that the entire organization can strive for. 

Getting started

There are many reasons to pursue a unified commerce strategy, from improved customer retention and loyalty to increased operational intelligence and efficiency. Research shows that unified commerce leaders grow at nearly twice the rate of their peers and achieve 50% higher inventory turnover.

It's also important to understand that unified commerce strategies can be applied to organizations across industries. From retail and entertainment to healthcare and public sector agencies, a unified commerce strategy can help improve and streamline experiences for customers, patients, constituents and fans.

Take the first step. Ask our experts how to get started with customer and AI agent journey mapping.