Unified commerce strategies for modern brands
Updated: 4 days ago
Unified commerce connects retail media, social, search and in-store into one path to purchase. Learn six steps to build one, plus a real campaign example.
Key Takeaways
Unified commerce integrates customer-facing channels and back-end systems, including e-commerce, point of sale, inventory, fulfillment and customer data, into a single source of truth, while omnichannel connects channels for the shopper but often leaves the underlying systems separate.
Connected shoppers are worth more to brands. Incisiv's 2025 State of the Industry report found that multi-channel shoppers spend 15% more per order and show 70% higher year-over-year retention than single-channel shoppers.
Paid media can work as retention infrastructure, not only acquisition, through tools such as Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions, which let brands offer exclusive discounts to repeat, recent and high-spend customers.
In Exverus by Brainlabs' 2024 "Marathons to Mainstream" campaign for Honey Stinger, one connected plan across audio, social, programmatic, search, Amazon and in-store media at Target grew gross revenue 20% year over year, nearly three times the 7% goal.
We've said it before -- kill the funnel!
The linear sales funnel is obsolete, because the path to purchase no longer runs in a straight line. Consumers weave between physical stores, websites, apps and social platforms with increasing fluidity, often within a single purchase. Salsify's 2026 Consumer Research, based on an October 2025 survey of more than 2,700 shoppers in the US, UK and Canada, found that 67% research products online before buying in store and 53% check products out in store before buying online. In grocery, the behavior is close to universal: FMI and NielsenIQ found that nearly 94% of grocery shoppers bought both online and in store in 2025.
For brand marketers and advertisers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity: how can you create cohesive, compelling experiences that meet potential consumers wherever they are? The answer is unified commerce.
What is the difference between unified commerce and omnichannel?
Unified commerce (UC) is the natural evolution of omnichannel strategy. Omnichannel focused on consistency across touchpoints, so a shopper could move from social media to a website to a store and recognize the same brand at each step. Unified commerce is the infrastructure underneath that experience: one platform and one customer record shared by the online store, point of sale, marketing and customer support, so every team works from the same data.
As Maropost's 2026 guide to unified commerce frames it, omnichannel describes what the shopper experiences, while unified commerce is the architecture that keeps that experience consistent.
For a media agency, that difference is practical rather than theoretical. UC allows us to manage optimizations, implement automation, report data and more from one platform or tech stack, instead of reconciling a dozen channel reports that each tell a partial story.
Coresight Research's 2025 unified commerce landscape makes the same point from the retail side: unifying customer, product and inventory data is what lets brands and retailers make data-driven decisions in real time. The shift isn't only about technology; it's about fundamentally reimagining how brands connect with consumers.
What role does retail media play in unified commerce?
Retail media connects advertising to the point of purchase, both online and in store, and gives brands access to retailers' first-party shopper data. EMARKETER forecasts US retail media ad spending of $72.97 billion in 2026, so it is often the largest commerce channel a brand needs to connect to the rest of its plan. Retail media can also support retention through tools that target existing customers, such as Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions.
Why should unified commerce matter to brands, not just retailers?
Customer acquisition
Shoppers don't think in silos or channels. Salsify's 2026 Consumer Research found that more than half of shoppers review two to three channels before buying everyday essentials or mid-range items like apparel and beauty.
The same survey found that physical stores (60%), online marketplaces (57%) and social platforms (52%) are all major places shoppers discover new products.
Meanwhile, acquisition is getting more expensive: Incisiv's 2025 State of the Industry report found that 77% of retailers saw customer acquisition costs rise over the previous year. Winning brands need to understand their target consumers' habits in multiple areas of life and reach them at multiple, connectable touchpoints, so that every impression builds toward a purchase rather than starting from zero.
Loyalty and retention
Conventional marketing wisdom says customer loyalty lives in CRM and email, but advances in first-party data collection are changing that. The same Incisiv research found that multi-channel shoppers show 70% higher year-over-year retention than single-channel shoppers, which makes the connected customer the one worth keeping.
In 2026, smart brands use paid media as retention infrastructure, not just acquisition.
This could look like retail media targeting existing customers, such as Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions, which let brands offer exclusive discounts to segments like repeat customers, recent customers and high-spend customers, or Walmart Connect's shopper segments.
It could also look like paid social suppression and loyalty sequencing, and programmatic retargeting laddered to customer lifetime value. Paid media platforms are building retention strategies into their infrastructure, but most brands are still underutilizing them.
Build more effective media plans
Collect insights from everywhere your consumers engage with brands and build a clear data narrative, so that each media plan is smarter than the last.
This matters more as budgets consolidate: EMARKETER forecasts that US retail media ad spending will reach $69.33 billion in 2026, up from $58.79 billion in 2025, with Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect taking more than 89% of the incremental dollars.
When that much spend flows through a handful of retail media networks, the brands that can connect those results to search, social and in-store performance will make sharper allocation decisions than the brands reading each network's dashboard in isolation.
How to build a unified commerce strategy
Map the journey, not the channels
Structure your marketing plan around audience segments and the "messy middle" between first exposure and purchase, rather than around channel budgets.
For each segment, ask where they discover products, where they research and where they prefer to buy. The answers rarely point to a single channel. Planning around the journey keeps every channel focused on the same question, which is what this person needs from the brand at this moment. It also keeps you ahead of rising expectations.
Connect your data
A unified journey needs a unified view of it. That means bringing first-party data, retailers' shopper data and media performance into one place, so that a click on social, a search on Amazon and a sale at Target can be read as parts of the same story.
Work with commerce platforms and marketing technology providers that connect physical retail, e-commerce, social commerce and marketplaces. At Exverus, we use Skai to manage e-commerce search across Amazon, Walmart, Sam's Club, Instacart, Target and Kroger; other platforms in the space include Salesforce, Adyen and Kibo.
Plan brand and performance as one system
When brand and performance run as separate plans with separate teams and KPIs, awareness campaigns build interest that nobody is set up to capture, and conversion campaigns compete for shoppers they never helped create.
Run them as one always-on plan instead: awareness channels should carry a path to purchase, and conversion channels should be built to capture the demand that awareness creates.
Marketers increasingly see the value. In Skai's 2025 State of Retail Media report, 61% said a full-funnel approach delivers more consistent messaging across the customer experience, and only 2% saw no significant value in it.
Make every touchpoint shoppable
Every extra step between an ad and a cart is a chance to lose the sale, and most of those steps happen on a phone.
PYMNTS Intelligence's 2025 Global Digital Shopping Index: U.S. Edition found that 42% of US shoppers used their phones for their most recent retail purchase, whether online or in a physical store.
Newer ad formats are built to close the gap. Meta's multi-retailer ads let brands place 3 to 20 retailer links inside a single static or video ad, so shoppers can buy from the retailer they already prefer in one click instead of landing on a where-to-buy page first.
Pair shoppable social and display with lean, mobile-first storefronts on each retailer, so the path from discovery to checkout stays short wherever it starts.
Bridge the digital and physical shelf
Most purchases still happen in stores, but most retail media dollars don't. According to EMARKETER, more than 80% of US retail sales still take place in physical stores, yet in-store retail media accounted for just 3.3% of retail media spending outside Amazon in 2025, and about one in four retail media buyers cite difficulty accessing in-store reach as a top challenge.
Plan onsite, offsite and in-store retail media together, and coordinate with retail partners so the demand your media drives meets product on the shelf. For brands willing to work through the logistics, the store is one of the least crowded places to win.
Measure the whole journey
Develop attribution models that account for the non-linear customer journey, and back them with incrementality testing that shows which sales your media actually caused.
Adoption is growing but uneven: EMARKETER and TransUnion found in July 2025 that 52% of US brand and agency marketers use incrementality testing or experiments, while Skai's 2025 report found that only about a quarter of organizations consider themselves proficient at measuring incrementality in retail media.
Without that rigor, a podcast ad that drives a branded search that converts on Amazon will look like a search win and an audio loss.
What are the challenges to consider in building a unified commerce strategy?
Data fragmentation
Bringing together in-store, online and offsite behavior requires significant investment in infrastructure and strategy, and many brands are working with legacy systems that were never designed for cross-channel integration.
For advertisers, fragmentation shows up as retail media, social and search reports that can't be reconciled, which makes it hard to know which dollars actually moved product.
Privacy and trust
Consumers want personalization, but they are increasingly wary of how their data is used. A Clutch survey of more than 400 US consumers, released in January 2026, found that 62% find ads that follow them "creepy" and 41% are uneasy with AI-driven personalization.
The same survey offers a way forward: nearly 60% said privacy laws have improved how brands handle data, which suggests that transparency and compliance can rebuild trust as regulations and expectations evolve.
Delivering contextually relevant, effective ads without overwhelming consumers or violating their privacy is a delicate balance. Brands must find ways to be present without being intrusive, which in practice means frequency caps, suppression of recent purchasers and a clear value exchange for any data a shopper shares.
Example of a unified commerce campaign
Exverus' 2024 “Marathons to Mainstream” campaign for Honey Stinger is a good example of unified commerce. The brand wanted to grow beyond elite athletes and reach everyday fitness-seekers. Its target “Challengers” were busy, high-income exercisers who didn’t know when to use the products or where to buy them.
Instead of running brand and performance as separate efforts, we built one always-on system around how these shoppers actually move between discovery and purchase.
Spotify audio introduced the brand during workouts.
Creator-led TikTok and Instagram content explained the products.
Meta’s One-Click Multi-Retailer ads let shoppers buy from the retailer they preferred.
Teads display and The Trade Desk retargeting brought back people who had shown interest.
Paid search and Performance Max captured the demand all of this created, and lean digital storefronts on each retailer made it easy to convert.
Physically, Amazon onsite and offsite media worked alongside large Honey Stinger product towers in Target stores nationwide.
The result was one connected path across direct-to-consumer, Amazon, wholesale and the store shelf, and the numbers reflected that. Gross revenue grew 20% year over year, nearly three times the 7% goal. Amazon sales rose 40%, wholesale rose 22%, ad spend efficiency improved 37%, and retail ROAS reached $3.70, 13% above target.
The path forward
The brands that will dominate are obliterating the boundaries between channels completely. Your consumers are already living in a unified world. They're swiping from TikTok to Amazon to your site to a physical store without blinking. If you're still thinking in terms of "digital strategy" versus "retail strategy," you're already dead in the water.
Will you be the brand that sets the standard, or the cautionary tale that couldn't keep pace?
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