Content-First Retail: The Future of Customer Experience in Value-Centric Commerce (web 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.
Insights
One-stop solutions, like unified commerce platforms, promise to streamline processes and enhance customer experience for retail brands. Yet unifying systems, methods, and tools may not be scalable or appropriate for every brand, particularly if they do not have a solid content strategy to ground and contextualize technology use.
Many brands have overinflated and siloed tech stacks resulting from tactical or reactionary tech adoption, which has led to disconnected internal systems and duplicative tools. This tech overload complicates internal operations and customer experience, often hindering rather than helping brand efficiency.
Rather than pushing for full unification of systems, a more effective strategy may be an integrated approach, centralizing only necessary tools while allowing others to operate independently when they add value. This approach demands a clear “why” behind tech adoption and alignment with brand and consumer needs.
Achieving a seamless customer experience requires brands to adopt a holistic content strategy, integrating content operations with customer journey insights. Understanding customer needs, preferences, and content touchpoints is essential to designing a coherent strategy that elevates front-end engagement and back-end functionality.
“We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” - Calvin Coolidge
Humans love a one-stop solution. The myth of a simplified, unified experience is almost irresistible, whether an all-in-one toothbrush cum flosser, a retailer where you buy your clothes and groceries in the same place, or a multi-solution tech system that claims to solve all your problems at once.
Over the past 15 years, the promise of retail commerce tech has been the same, regardless of the trending technology: Use our one-stop solution to streamline costs and processes while improving sales and customer experience. Think IoT, omnichannel, headless commerce, the metaverse, AI, and now unified commerce.
Promise is great. Reality can be different.
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.
Indeed, 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.
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.
The Promise of Unified Commerce
Retail tech sales vendors love to mythologize unified commerce—or, a fully connected back-end for retail e-commerce tech systems—to drive a seamless front-end customer experience. For instance, unified commerce or “unified retail” was one of the major themes of ShopTalk’s spring 2024 conference. In this specific context, the event organizers defined “unified retail” as “[a] step beyond omnichannel … [that] refers to the harmonization of all retail channels to create a singular, frictionless and continuous experience.”
Yet, unified commerce or unified retail remains at best an ideal future state for many brands. In our experience working with e-commerce brands, a fully unified back-end is unrealistic for many retailers—never mind possibly not desirable. Shoe-horning your teams into tech solutions that either don’t fit or aren’t scalable is just as bad as having an overinflated tech stack.
Unified commerce is effectively omnichannel by another name. Unifying front-end content or back-end systems into a comprehensive tool like Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud is enticing. The sell is that all of your brand’s retail operations—from the front-end e-commerce experience, marketing, and sales to back-end payments processing, inventory management, order fulfillment, and CRM—can be managed in a single system.
Unified commerce represents an idealized state of simplicity to provide more unified, personalized products and solutions to customers while streamlining internal processes and tools for the brand. One problem is that to use these types of tools, retail brands are forced to compromise, usually in terms of customizations, cost, features and functionality, and user experience. They may cut corners to “unify,” building a more general-use digital e-commerce ecosystem that does less for consumers. Another problem is that frequently shifting tech tools does not equate to a shift in a brand’s business strategy or priorities, even if it migrates retail commerce operations from a group of individual tools into Shopify or Salesforce.
The Concerted Finale of Customer Experience
The current state of retail technology is a mess. Many brands are organizationally, technologically, and strategically siloed, which makes any idea of unified commerce a massive investment in internal change management that may or may not achieve the desired outcomes. Overinflated tech stacks are an expensive problem, particularly when multiple teams use duplicative tools or even manage content for overlapping platforms.
Also, despite a bevy of consumer data tools to measure and map the customer journey in real-time across channels, many brands struggle to differentiate themselves and deliver the right experience on the right platform to the right consumers. Part of this is simply because brands are under a ridiculous amount of pressure to stay competitive, never mind the ever-creaking supply chain. But also it is because most retail brands’ attempt to “stay relevant” in their specific market often prioritizes what is popular over what is organizationally appropriate and results in an additive, tactical approach to e-commerce, marketing, and content—and, in turn, retail technology—that is not truly grounded in a deep “why” or a holistic, user-focused strategy.
While the unified commerce platforms of the world do cover many of the tools and processes that drive e-commerce, the story with retail commerce and content is more complicated. So much of the content and data that connect to and drive retail commerce exists outside of the walls of a brand’s e-commerce ecosystem, from social media posts to live events to IRL bricks-and-mortar store experiences. From a tech integration perspective, this means that any unified commerce solution needs to connect with other external tools and APIs. But it also means that the retail teams behind the commerce tools need to have an integrated, collaborative strategy for content and a shared perspective on that happy place where brand priorities meet customer needs to be able to deliver truly customer-focused products, services, and experiences.
Why does understanding consumer perspectives on content matter for retail brands?
Content-wise, it is basically a dog-eat-dog kind of world for retail e-commerce brands. It is extremely difficult to stand out, never mind keep up, among the chaos of today’s content-driven ecosystem, both digital and IRL. When it comes to shopping, whether online or IRL, consumers now have to make their way through a seemingly endless universe of choices. To use an opera analogy, customer experience is like the concerted finale of a Mozartian opera buffa where everyone is singing and talking at once.
Consumers are constantly attacked on multiple channels by streams of content created by different teams within the same brand, often communicating different stories about the same products in disconnected, illogical ways. To make matters worse, e-commerce can be a trip down a cross-channel digital rabbit hole, resulting in long, windy consumer journeys that are hard to track and often don’t lead to purchases. This means that even if a brand adopts a unified commerce solution for its back-end systems, the front-end customer experience may remain fragmented because there is no plan or strategy for all the different types of content that feed into it.
One reason that many fast fashion retailers succeed where other brands fail is not just because they have found a way to fast-track trends into instantly shoppable products. It also is because successful fast fashion retailers are masters of holistic content strategy. As Marisa Runyon, SHEIN’s head of content creation told Modern Retail, the brand’s e-commerce site functions with tightly organized content production and operations on the back end that drive front-end content and digital customer experience. The brand knows who its consumers are, their content preferences, and how to guide them seamlessly from one content touchpoint to the next. Say what you will about the mega navigation approach to SHEIN’s e-commerce site information architecture, but the site is very easy and intuitive to use with multiple guided pathways to explore and discover the brand through content, whether you arrive at a product detail page (PDP) from TikTok, the homepage, or Google.
Retail Operations and Tech Stack Overload
If you hone in on retail commerce through the lens of content, a brand’s front-end and back-end ecosystems are separate but integrated constructs that involve a complex array of people, processes, and tools. For digital e-commerce, sophisticated content management systems (CMSs) serve multiple functions, including communicating brand and product content, enabling and tracking online shopping, presenting the aesthetics and architecture of design, storing brand digital assets, tracking and housing sales transactions and other customer data, and connecting with other related corporate systems and tools that collect and house customer, product, and brand data. All of these arenas function together to drive digital customer experience.
In our work at It’s A Working Title LLC, the agency behind Fashion Strategy Weekly, we find that the front-end and back-end brand teams responsible for commerce, digital experience, and content function almost completely separately, even if the tools they use are “unified.” Often, when we ask front-end content or marketing teams for a map of tech systems, platforms, and tools their teams use to manage content, we are met with confusion or, worse, blank looks. When we go a step further to map out systems, platforms, and tools, we find that individual teams function as a tech fiefdom, frequently with duplicative and unnecessary tools. It is not much better when we consult the back-end tech teams and request a reference architecture or a technical schematic of systems, platforms, and tools. Usually, we receive a complex diagram illustrating a multi-faceted relationship between back-end systems, platforms, and tools that at best superficially illustrates related or companion front-end content tools and processes.
Even if most of a retail brand’s e-commerce backend operations are centered within a tool like Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud or even Adobe Enterprise Management (AEM), most teams retain extensive use of other tools outside of these environments, even if they are technically duplicative. Why? Because they have existing systems, tools, and processes that work and/or content and databases that are difficult to migrate. Most retail brands suffer from tech stack overload because of the additive nature of a lot of tech adoption, particularly after the 2020 pandemic.
As content strategists, we do think that single-source content (i.e. a single source of truth for every piece of content) and, in turn, centralized publishing models (i.e. content creation, management, and publishing from a single content CMS) are important for managing omnichannel content. Yet, the same is not necessarily true—or, perhaps, not realistic in practice—for all retail tech tools, particularly those related to product and customer data. Some legacy tools like CRM and PIM databases may have value within specific contexts and would do better as part of an integrated retail tech framework rather than being migrated over. As with all digital transformation, it depends on the brand, its tech stack, its consumers, and its specific goals.
Integrated Retail Needs Holistic Content Strategy and Content Operations
Taking an integrated, rather than unified, approach to retail commerce will only work if brands put in the work to evolve how they think about and strategize content and customer experience at every phase and touchpoint of the shopping journey. This will require documenting existing systems, tools, teams, processes, workflows, and rules for content and commerce, defining future state priorities, goals, features, and functionality, and architecting a strategic transformation plan for a more streamlined, integrated future state. To refine the retail commerce model and, in turn, customer experience and storytelling, brands must be specific and directional about the “why” behind specific systems, processes, and tools to define a new content-first commerce strategy that is appropriate, manageable, and scalable.
The first challenge of unified commerce is one of operational maturity. Retail brands need to rethink how they approach the holistic tech ecosystem that drives customer experience. What tools do you need? Why are they important? How are you measuring performance?
When considering the current state of a retail brand’s tech stack and content ecosystem, we always begin with a series of “what,” “how” and “why” questions:
Who are your customers? What are their specific needs and preferences at different stages of their shopping journey when it comes to customer experience, content, and products? What do they expect from you? How, where, when, and why do they shop?
Why do your products exist? What value do they add? What are your sales, marketing, and product goals and how are you tracking them?
What systems, tools, and processes do your teams use? How are they organized (e.g., are they separate or connected)? Why do these systems, tools, and processes exist? What value do they bring to your brand and customers?
Why is your content important? To whom is it addressed? What value does it add? What are your brand goals for content, and how are you measuring it? On what channels and through what content do customers experience your brand? How do we plan, create, manage, and publish content?
Our teams usually answer these types of questions as part of the discovery phase process of a brand content audit, though they can be useful in other phases of digital transformation. Knowing the answers to these questions affects both the content and tech recommendations we make and how we approach the task of building a tailored content strategy and content operations model.
The idea of integrated retail, like content strategy, is by no means one-size-fits-all. The future of a more streamlined, customer-focused e-commerce experience starts with getting the balance of content and commerce right through strong content operations and a content-first commerce model based on a brand’s unique vision and goals, its products, and its consumers.