Product sellers who have reached a high level of success and are still bogged down by manual processes need to adopt a unified commerce software solution that allows them to interconnect each critical aspect of their operation. Many of the 8,000 product sellers we work with here at Cin7 have experienced explosive growth since the start of the pandemic made online shopping a necessity.
Often, these companies find their reliance on manual stock counts and data entry has become unsustainable and increasingly prone to human error. We find that when a company begins searching for IT help to modernize their software stack to keep up with their growth, they’re ready for the power of unified commerce.
Key Takeaways
- Unified Workflow: Unified commerce interconnects sales, inventory, fulfillment, and finance into a single automated system.
- Efficiency: It eliminates the "swivel chair" effect of toggling between disparate apps, reducing manual data entry and human error.
- Scalability: Automation allows businesses to handle explosive growth across multiple marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart, eBay) and physical locations.
- Real-Time Visibility: Provides accurate, real-time data on sales performance and inventory levels to prevent overstocking.
- Cost-Effective: Offers the functionality of a bloated ERP at a fraction of the cost with over 700 established integrations.
Cin7 provides a unified commerce solution like no other on the market today. Cin7’s all-in-one unified commerce solution automates all your workflows – how and where you sell, how you manage all your inventory, how you fulfill orders and how you manage your finances.
Bring Your Critical Business Functions Together
Adopting and paying for disparate software programs to manage individual business needs is certainly one approach to consider, but leads to the “swivel chair” approach of having to toggle between accounting programs, spreadsheets, e-commerce backends and shipping applications. It may seem like progress, but this approach is costly in both monthly fees and staffing resources.
By bringing all of your business functions together, across sales and operations in a unified and automated workflow, Cin7 helps sell to more customers through more sales channels and process more orders – more efficiently and faster than ever before.
How Unified Commerce Works for Your Business
The real power of unified commerce is that all of your sales channels draw support from a single platform. One unified data model managing everything from inventory to order fulfillment and financials.
Here’s a scenario that illustrates the concept of unified commerce:
Your company sells products to consumers both online and in brick-and-mortar locations. You also have a healthy wholesale distribution division that sells in bulk to major retailers. Over time you’ve grown to 3 branded online marketplaces, Amazon, Walmart and Ebay, 4 custom ecommerce sites and 10 physical store locations.
Adopting an end-to-end software solution that connects to marketplaces and enables you to manage your ecommerce sites combined with overall inventory management and sales tracking will streamline your operations and save thousands with the efficiencies it creates. The solution should allow you to track store inventory, transfer orders to other locations, ship orders from your stores and warehouses, and manage customer loyalty programs.
It should also let you work with the third party logistics provider (3PL) you have contracted with to manage your warehouse operations, fulfill orders, and process returns.
And if you're in a fast-moving industry, like fashion, where trends shift quickly, real-time sales performance analysis is essential. You need to know what's selling now so you're not tying up too much capital in overstocked inventory.
Unified commerce brings together all aspects of a product seller’s business. When orders are placed, either by consumers or in bulk by major retailers, transactions are automatically recorded to accounting programs like QuickBooks and corresponding adjustments are made to inventory quantities. Ongoing management of each sales outlet is maintained within the Cin7 platform.
Workflow automation is a key benefit of unified commerce, enabling you to:
- Automate Purchase Orders: Generate orders automatically when stock hits predetermined thresholds.
- Enable EDI Connectivity: Allow major retailers to place wholesale orders directly into your system.
- Trigger Fulfillment: Automatically send orders to your 3PL for faster processing.
- Shift Inventory: Move stock seamlessly between different warehouse or store locations.
- Simplify Payments: Provide dedicated portals for wholesale customers to manage their accounts.
And perhaps most importantly? Our customizable analytics and reporting give you real-time visibility into accurate financial data whether you prefer dashboard views or pivot-table-ready reports. No more guessing. Just clear, actionable numbers.
Our research conclusively confirms that product sellers thrive, grow sales, and reduce costs when they adopt a modern tech stack with a cloud-based inventory management solution that embraces the unified commerce approach to selling.
What You Get With Unified Commerce
When you embrace unified commerce, you get an accurate, 360-degree view of what's happening across your entire business. You have customer infoformation, orders, and inventory, all in one place. Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Sync sales, accounting and inventory control in real time
- Design branded B2C and B2B websites to sell to consumers and major retailers
- Completely integrate your Shopify site and your retail location with included POS app
- Set order thresholds to automate purchase orders when stock runs low
- Refer to sales dashboards or customize demand forecast reports
- Assign orders to your 3PL for accurate fulfillment and shipping
- Maintain a modern cloud-based tech stack
- Maximize warehouse space
- Cut overhead and keep headcount trimmed
- Quickly process invoices and payments from wholesale customers
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is a Unified Commerce Platform?
A unified commerce platform connects every part of your business, your online stores, physical locations, inventory, orders, and accounting, into one central system. Instead of toggling between tools that barely talk to each other, everything lives in one place and updates in real time. No more "why doesn't my inventory match my sales report?" moments. With Cin7, you get a single source of truth for your whole operation, so you can sell more, stress less, and always know what's happening across your business.
What's an Example of Unified Commerce in Action?
Imagine you sell products online, in physical stores, and wholesale to major retailers. With a unified commerce platform like Cin7, all of it stays in sync automatically. A customer buys something on your website — your inventory updates instantly, your accounting software logs the sale, and if stock dips below your set threshold, a purchase order fires off before you even notice the shelf is getting light. Meanwhile, your wholesale buyers can place orders directly into your system via EDI, and your 3PL gets triggered to fulfill them. That's unified commerce doing the heavy lifting so you don't have to.
How Is Unified Commerce Different From Omnichannel?
Great question. They sound similar, but there's a key difference. Omnichannel means selling across multiple channels (your website, your store, an app). Unified commerce takes that further by connecting all those channels to one backend system that updates in real time. With a typical omnichannel setup, your channels often run on separate systems that sync up after the fact. That means there's always a lag, and data gaps are almost guaranteed. Unified commerce keeps your inventory, orders, and customer data accurate across every channel, all at the same time. Think of omnichannel as the goal and unified commerce as how you actually get there.
Who Benefits Most From Unified Commerce?
Product sellers experiencing explosive growth who are bogged down by manual stock counts, data entry, and the "swivel chair" approach of toggling between disparate apps benefit most from unified commerce. Companies selling across multiple marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart, eBay), physical locations, and wholesale channels gain the most efficiency from a single automated system.
