Content-First Retail: The Future of Customer Experience in Value-Centric Commerce (download version)
FSW examines the promise of unified commerce and argues why a more purposeful, content-first approach may offer retail brands and consumers a better future.
“We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” - Calvin Coolidge
This white paper explores the promise of one-stop retail tech solutions like unified commerce through the lens of content and customer experience. Many retail brands fall for shiny-object syndrome when it comes to tech, resulting in tactical, reactionary decision-making that may not be right for their business or customers. Enter the overinflated, highly siloed tech stacks at many retail brands, large and small.
Shopify predicts the global e-commerce market will reach $4.8 trillion in 2025. Gartner forecasts that global retail tech spending will top $262.6 billion in 2027. This is a huge opportunity for retail brands and retail tech vendors. However, the rapid growth of e-commerce makes foundational strategy—especially for customer experience, products, and content—critical to ensure that brand investments in technology are scalable, purposeful, and useful to brand teams and consumers.
Many brands may not be operationally mature enough for certain technologies. Digital transformation is an act of change management for which many brands are not culturally prepared. Retail commerce decision-makers need to think about integrated, rather than unified, commerce built on a foundation of collaborative product, digital, data, and customer experience strategy and collaborative internal communications, preferably backed by solid content operations.
This paper argues that a unified solution to retail commerce tech may not be ideal for some brands. Moving into a new unified commerce platform could require a brand to undergo a significant transformation effort, substantially increase its customer acquisition and retention costs, and, worse, ultimately prove an unnecessary shift that would not truly add value to the brand or its consumers.
As we explore, a better path forward for many brands may be to adopt an integrated approach that seeks to centralize and unify only the systems, processes, and tools that make sense and meaningfully serve the brand and consumers (e.g., to support more centralized content publishing, to deliver personalization, or to improve internal collaboration). This requires brands to establish a “why” for using and integrating specific tech and then to purge unused, duplicative, or legacy systems and tools, allowing other tech to remain independent as long as it strategically makes sense and forms a logical branch of a comprehensive operational tree.
