Unified commerce is all about uniting sales channels, processes and data in a single platform, enabling brands to deliver a seamless customer experience. It drives new ways to gather, analyzes and deploys data, streamlines inventory management and overall, simplifies global expansion.
At a glance, luxury fashion label Represent and premium beverage brand Waterdrop are two totally different companies in different industries. However, both brands have mastered unified commerce—using Shopify to drive high-growth and a seamless experience for customers.
Founded in 2011 by brothers George and Michael Heaton, the UK fashion brand Represent is now on the cusp of £100 million in annual revenue. Represent sells their products on multiple channels including localized online stores, social media, pop-up stores, and new major brick-and-mortar locations in Manchester and Los Angeles.
waterdrop® is a beverage company founded in Austria, producing hydration cubes made from fruit and plant extracts as well as reusable bottles and other drinkware. Their products can be found online, through their app, as well as in over 40 brick-and-mortar stores in 30 different countries achieving an average growth rate of around 40% per annum in recent years.
Here are three ways Represent and waterdrop® drive unified commerce with Shopify.
1. By connecting both physical and digital stores to make customer experiences consistent
Shoppers today expect a consistent brand experience across every different channel they use to make a purchase. For that reason, uniting physical and digital stores is more than critical for brands—it’s essential.
Represent’s success was heavily driven by ecommerce powered by Shopify in their first decade. More recently, when the company opened their first store in Los Angeles, they recognized a need for a consistent brand experience as they scaled across more channels than ever before. Represent decided to expand their Shopify portfolio and deploy Shopify POS software and hardware to connect physical and online stores. Shopify POS is fast, easy to set up, and flexible, allowing the brand to quickly take payments anywhere on the shopfloor across both brick-and-mortar and pop-up stores. Selling on multiple channels has, as James Gullick, Chief Product Officer at Represent describes, a “halo effect.” The physical brand presence of a brick-and-mortar store in Los Angeles made people look up Represent online more, ultimately leading to an increase of 59% YoY in revenue in that market alone.
At the same time, Shopify’s real-time inventory tracking and full integration with Represent’s storehouses and shipping points gives their customers the flexibility they expect. When they order online, they can pick up items from the store or try out clothes and order in store while getting the products shipped to their home.
Similarly to Represent, waterdrop® started by using Shopify as their website and ecommerce platform. They then expanded to Shopify POS across their retail locations. In addition, waterdrop® launched a new app which was integrated with Shopify to allow customers to shop their Microdrinks as well as other drinkware products on multiple channels. This unified commerce approach has been central to how the brand’s engaged its customer base. As Kevin Breese, Global Retail Director, says, “Our whole proposition to our customers is to be a multi-channel retailer. We allow our customers to taste our product or buy our product in stores and then seamlessly go online to refill and repurchase. We need both face-to-face interactions and online elements to really create a community.”
2. Boosting customer loyalty through centralized data insights
One of the biggest benefits of unifying channels is having a clear understanding of customer behavior and preferences across all touch points.
“Shopify helps us understand our online and offline customers by providing us with very clear data. From this data, we can then understand what motivates our customers to purchase. We collect data both online and offline. Customers can return blisters to the stores from which they gain loyalty points. These points can in turn be exchanged for products on our website,” explains Ieva Urbonaite, Global Head of E-Commerce at waterdrop®.
Ieva adds, “Data is extremely important to our business. We track things like orders, revenue, conversion rates, average order value as well as cohorts and retention rates on a daily basis. Shopify provides us with reports that are very easy to use as well as the analysis. Understanding these metrics and analyzing them helps us understand our customers even better and offer them a smoother user experience. With Shopify being an essential part of our growth thus far, we are confident that this data-driven approach will continue to ensure our stability, efficiency and sales.”
Christoph Hermann, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at waterdrop® adds that the beverage brand uses Shopify’s cohort analysis to track online and offline buying behavior of customer groups over time. This was useful as it allowed them to uncover insights that then led to educated decisions for the future. One example was learning that customers who bought ICE TEA PEACH spent up to two times more than the average customer. This then led to the business launching the new ICE TEA RASPBERRY flavour that proved very successful. Not only did the data insights from Shopify inspire waterdrop® to develop and launch new products, it also led to additional revenue across channels.
Paul Spencer, CEO at Represent, highlights that the brand places a similar value on the ability to bring together different data sources in a unified platform. “Shopify is key for our data driven decision making,” he says. “It has all of our stock levels, profiles, and other data in one place. And it interprets it in a way that empowers our team to make better choices and understand our customers better.”
3. By scaling faster overall
If there’s one thing that unites every successful business, it’s a constant drive for growth. Having a unified platform makes it simpler for brands to expand and scale without worrying about potential silos forming—for example, across different geographies or stores.
The wealth of data that Shopify provides allows Represent to get a clear understanding of a market: what’s working and where it’s working—or why it isn’t working. They then leverage the data, scale organically in a new market and add paid media, marketing campaigns, and influencers. “Shopify really is the entry to the market, which gives us the ability to then scale there after,” says Stefan Lewis, Represent’s Chief Digital Officer. When Represent opened their store in Los Angeles, they already had a good understanding of their customers from data provided through online sales, which they could link to their physical presence across their store design and sales strategies.
At Represent, the business’s global footprint has rapidly grown, driven by the launch of four localized websites and four localized apps. The team achieved this using Shopify Markets—which quickly localizes storefronts with languages and currency options, while keeping them unified with other instances to make management and operations simple.
Stefan says that these new instances quickly drove growth for the business: “Since we offered local currencies in 2021, the year after we saw an international growth of 50 percent in sales. Most recently, we launched our German translation and that added an immediate 30 percent increase in conversion rates and over 100 percent increase in organic sessions.”
Ieva at waterdrop® explains how a unified approach has supported the business’s growth: “Initially, we started using Shopify at waterdrop® with only a D2C (direct to consumer) channel and markets. Now, we’ve expanded with POS across retail stores in Europe and an app that’s integrated with Shopify—making things even more convenient for customers.” Whenever waterdrop® enters a new market, they first start by launching an online store. They then take learnings and transfer it to their expansion strategy and add physical stores to grow their sales channels and brand presence locally.
On the technical side, Aris Brauchart, Chief Technology Officer at waterdrop®, adds that Shopify’s metafields (which make it easy to attach additional information to a resource, like a product listing) as well as its API, make it possible to expand Shopify however you like. He highlights that as a unified commerce platform, Shopify is particularly flexible and scalable: “With Shopify, it’s very easy to set up your e-commerce store. It’s extremely customizable and has a rich eco-system of apps that help you provide the features you need to create value for your customers and company.”
With unified commerce, both Represent and waterdrop® have been able to grow faster, better serve customers, and untap data insights that would have previously been lost. With customer expectations, global competition, and the number of consumer touchpoints continuing to grow, this unified approach—and a centralized platform to power it—will only become more important.
