Sell everywhere with Commerce Layer Links.
For too long, selling online has been considered synonymous with building an ecommerce website. In reality, websites are just one of many possible sales channels. In a world where conversational commerce, social commerce, and generative AI are transforming how customers engage with brands, websites are on the verge of becoming significantly less relevant—and may no longer hold the importance they do today.
If the recent pandemic has taught us anything, it is not that we need more websites, but rather more effective ways to sell online through email, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, and all other channels we already use to communicate every day. The truth is, as long as you have some stock on hand and a way to share it with your audience, you have everything you need to transform any customer interaction into a sales experience, whatever the channel, device, and market.
Today, we are introducing Links, a no-code technology powered by Commerce Layer that enables any stock to be sold anywhere by using the most foundational component of the Web—a URL. Links represent the execution of a "unified commerce" vision that has driven our product development from the very beginning of our journey. By getting back to the basics of commerce, we're solving a problem that's been around since the advent of the Internet as a sales channel, and that is only getting more relevant with time.
The retail case.
According to Statista, ecommerce accounts for 20% of all retail sales worldwide. Taking out the digitally native brands, for which online sales generate almost all their revenue, it can be safely said that traditional retailers still make less than 10% from online sales. Even so, all digitization efforts are focused on building better ecommerce websites, rather than modernizing retail stores.
Consider a brand or retailer with physical stores and an ecommerce site. The brand offers a catalog of products that are stocked in multiple locations, namely the ecommerce inventory warehouse(s) and the physical stores.
In terms of organization, different store managers are responsible for different parts of the brand's sales. A store manager may be responsible for online sales, which pulls stock from the ecommerce warehouse and processes payments through an online payment gateway. In contrast, retail store managers are responsible for offline sales, which are sales of stock available in store and paid in person using POS systems.
Each store, whether online or brick-and-mortar, can be seen as a sub-company of the brand with its own budget and sales targets. Often, different stores are actually operated by different legal entities and it is not uncommon for an online merchant to have a different legal entity than their company's retail organization.
The most complex companies have an even more distributed structure, with each store being run as a separate legal entity, using the brand for marketing purposes but representing a completely different organization from the head office.
Think of the franchise business model, for example, where an established brand, known as the "franchisor," allows an independent business owner, or "franchisee," to use its branding, business model, and other intellectual property in exchange for some fees and royalties.
Whatever the case may be, every store has the same goal: to sell more of their own stock. Sales assistants who work in physical stores care about their store's business, since their salaries and commissions depend on those sales. It's how companies motivate them, their store managers and area managers to sell more. It's a healthy competition within the company that pushes sales and revenue upward.
There is no question that digital channels represent a huge opportunity for them. The solution, however, is not as obvious as it might seem.
The advent of ecommerce.
Before ecommerce, customers only had one option for purchasing a company's products: They needed to physically visit the retail stores and buy. As the first ecommerce websites were being developed, retail store managers saw them more as internal competitors than as opportunities for growth. While they recognized that the new online channels had big potential for their company, those channels weren't selling more of their own stock, so they were not contributing to the growth of their retail businesses.
Things haven't changed much since then. Over time, digital teams have added more omnichannel capabilities to their websites, such as "Find in store" and "Buy Online Pick Up In Store" functionalities. The goal was to include retail as part of the online stock pool and provide customers with seamless shopping experiences across all channels.
Despite decades of promises, however, omnichannel businesses have failed to deliver. In most cases, ecommerce websites sell less than 10% of a company's stock and drive only a minority of their site visitors to buy in the physical stores. The point is, even with the most advanced omnichannel architecture, where every stock item in the stores is available in real time online—an extremely rare situation—retail sales assistants still lack a tool to sell online.
For them, the company website is useless. As a matter of fact, by sharing a PDP or PLP link with their customers, they're directing them to another store, an internal competitor selling another stock, and not even receiving a commission for the referral.
Creating another ecommerce website, connected to their stock and payment gateway, is not an option for them, as it would conflict with the brand's official website and confuse customers. In the absence of an alternative, they have had no other option but to find a workaround.
The Pay by Link workaround.
To overcome the limitations of ecommerce websites and still leverage the digital channels to increase sales, the retail sales assistants have found a practical solution: as soon as a client agrees to purchase something, either via email, phone, or Whatsapp, they use the Pay by Link feature (if available) provided by their POS terminal provider for remote payment. Upon receiving a payment, they manually create an order in their OMS or ERP and fulfill it.
Although the process may work to some extent, it's far from ideal. First and foremost, a Pay by Link is just an online payment request, with no context. Customers don't know what they're paying for, they just need to trust the sales assistant who shared the link with them. Secondly, it is a very manual and error-prone process that is inefficient at best. Last but not least, a Pay by Link can only be used for 1:1 interactions with the customers. There is no point in sharing the same Pay by Link with more customers.
Whenever the sales assistant wants to display a product or a list of products to a group of customers, for instance to promote the latest arrivals or offer a special discount, they need a webpage to show a list of products, but not a page from the website. They need a page that is connected to their stock and payment gateway, and that can be personalized with any price or promotion.
Links bring retail online.
With Commerce Layer Links, each store can connect their own stock, generate a link based on a SKU or a selection of SKUs and share it with their customers via email, SMS, WhatsApp, or their clienteling app. They can also print QR-codes and digitize in-person experiences, such as pop-up shops, where customers can scan the code to buy products and have the items shipped directly to their home addresses.
The link will direct customers to a microstore, which is a dedicated landing page that displays the selected products and that is completely separate from the online store. From there, customers can buy through a fast checkout, connected to the same payment gateway used in the store. As a result, all reconciliation is automated and nothing changes from a financial standpoint.
The microstore and checkout applications are open source and can be fully customized to match the brand's look and feel. The entire process can also be automated by integrating the company's ERP, PIM, CMS, or any other system.
Links are all private and independent of the ecommerce site. In fact, stores can share links to SKUs that aren't even listed online, either because they're not part of the current assortment or because they're out of stock. They can also assign a custom price to the products contained in a link, or apply a dedicated promotion, without affecting what appears on the website.
When the stock is not available in the store, the sales assistant can use Links to sell the stock from another store or the ecommerce warehouse. Cross-store commissions are automatically tracked using an embedded attribution mechanism that is not dependent on cookies or sessions, guaranteeing accuracy.
Beyond retail.
The deep dive into the retail use case highlights a current problem in the market, and offers Links as an immediate solution that brands can start using today. The possibilities offered by Links, however, are endless. Based on the same commerce API that powers some of the world's most innovative brands, Links support a huge variety of use cases, including those that do not even exist yet. You can start to learn about some of those use cases, and more, by reading our Links product overview found on our blog.
At Commerce Layer, we're always striving to future-proof our technology, so you can too. If you're interested in finding out more, please get in touch. You can get started in days and discover a new way of selling that can transform your business forever.