“I actually think we’re in a post-omnichannel world,” said Harley Finkelstein, president at Shopify, during a session at NRF 2025. It’s a moment where retailers are striving for a level of continuity across touchpoints. In fact, the journey should be so seamless, a shopper shouldn’t be able to tell where one point of-sale ends and the next one begins.
“I can now step outside and look at the ecosystem and go, OK, that's how to do it, right? You create an ecosystem that feeds each other, right? It's the same woman who's watching the show, who's listening to the podcast, who's buying the clothes,” said Sara Foster, describing the synergy between her and sister Erin Foster’s The World's First Podcast, her clothing brand Favorite Daughter and the Netflix hit show “Nobody Wants This.”
But Foster didn’t have that formula in mind initially; it evolved over time. And now it represents a successful model of “unified commerce,” the next iteration of omnichannel retail.
To achieve unified commerce, retailers must integrate their “sales channels, data, and back-end systems into a single platform,” according to a Salesforce blog post.
“Omnichannel was really about connecting all of the dots. With unified commerce, it’s about creating that continuous, uninterrupted experience,” as Josh Sevcik, lead commerce strategist at CDW, told BizTech. “It’s not just saying we’re integrated, it’s saying that it’s truly seamless.”
Here are the essential technologies that power unified commerce and how retailers at NRF 2025 are deploying the model:
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