How Implementing Unified Carts Can Enhance Your eCommerce Strategy

In a world where consumers are easily distracted and utilize many different touch points prior to completing a purchase, it is imperative that brands ensure consumers’ checkout process is as seamless as possible. According to Baynard Institute, shoppers are already quickly abandoning their carts for a variety of reasons such as, “too complicated/ long checkout process”, and “the site wanted me to create an account.”

Now if we couple this with an ever growing population of distracted shoppers across many devices, brands stand to lose shoppers faster than they gained them. One such way that brands have begun to combat this issue is by investing more into their unified shopping experiences like unified carts. In the post, we’ll discuss what unified carts are, how they can enhance your customer experiences and how Elastic Path helps you to achieve it.

What is a Unified Cart ?

When we speak of unified carts, we are referring to a cart checkout process that allows customers to seamlessly add, remove, modify or purchase items, across as many touch points available to them, from both the brand, and even their subsequent sub-brands.

For example, let’s take a look at the GAP. When you enter their website, GAP has 3 other subsequent brands available for their customers to also shop from. Rather than creating silos that make it hard for their customers to complete their purchase, they have begun to enhance their unified commerce experiences, by allowing customers to populate a universal cart across all 4 brands and also allow their customers to complete their purchase on their device of choice. Creating a cohesive checkout experience is an integral part of the puzzle as a retailer; and if done correctly, you will quickly reap the benefits.

What are the benefits of implementing a unified cart checkout process?

Increased Conversion Rate

By offering one centralized checkout process, brands eliminate the need for shoppers to jump from site to site, create individual carts, and start over every time they switch to a new device. Therefore, by making their checkout process less complicated, it will also help to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion rates.

Personalized Shopping Experiences

With a more streamlined checkout process, brands will gain a better ability to follow and track their customers across all of their devices with more targeted and tailored to their interest.

Single Data Channel

With a unified cart, brands can create a single data channel that provides access to on-demand customer-centric data about where, when, why and how their customers shop. With this timely data, brands now have the opportunity to become more strategic in their marketing and invest in it more efficiently to match their customers.

Optimal media mix

Similarly to the aforementioned benefit, this data can also be used to inform brands about the optimal channel mix, offers, promotions, and recommendations that best serve the customers for a more unique experience that keeps them engaged.

Revenue Growth

By addressing and monitoring customer preferences and adjusting your eCommerce strategy to embrace a unified commerce experience, brands stand to increase their average order value, which in turn helps to propel revenue growth.

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How Can I Get Started with Unified Carts?

Deploying a unified cart may not be as simple as it sounds. Most legacy eCommerce platforms are most times rigid and tightly coupled, which makes it difficult to leverage your product, catalog, and price data across multiple channels and stores. Therefore, most times, brands have to end up creating multiple individual instances leaving customers with a disjointed experience.

At Elastic Path, customers can leverage the API-First, Headless, Microservices solution that allows them to unify the data and create multiple instances across channels with just one solution. As such, it becomes easy to create a unified cart that spans across their eCommerce strategy. Take a look at the demonstration below to see how the brand BelleVie is able to deploy their unified cart.

If you're interested in seeing more or have any questions, feel free to reach out us!