Modern retail is being transformed by several converging trends, including artificial intelligence (AI), social and live commerce, sustainability and returns optimisation. Each of these trends intensifies the need for a unified platform – not just for operational efficiency but also to enable new business models and customer experiences that would be impractical on fragmented systems.
AI and machine learning are now pivotal to personalisation, demand forecasting and next-best-offer engines. But their effectiveness depends on high-quality, unified data across customer behaviour, product attributes and inventory. As Databricks notes, successful retail media networks (RMNs) require ‘high-quality, unified consumer data that paints a 360° view of each shopper – what they buy, how they browse, what promotions they respond to, and how they interact across channels’. Without unified commerce, AI tools operate on disjointed inputs, leading to degraded recommendations, lag or misalignment between channels. Fashion buyers themselves are signalling an openness to AI for assortment planning and trend prediction, underlining the commercial importance of clean, connected data environments.
Meanwhile, the rise of social commerce, livestream shopping and augmented-reality-driven product interactions demands seamless orchestration across front ends and back ends. In the 2024 holiday season, Salesforce reported that AI- and agent-driven tools influenced USD 229 billion of global online sales (19% of total) via product recommendations, targeted offers and conversational support, and that usage of AI chatbots rose 42% year-over-year. Industry leaders also stress that the future of shopping is hybrid everything, with customers expecting a single continuous journey whether they start on social media, in store or on a livestream. Only a unified commerce architecture can ensure that inventory, pricing, customer context and fulfilment are synchronised across such fluid journeys.
At the same time, sustainability and circular commerce models are no longer niche experiments – they are becoming central to retail strategies under consumer and regulatory pressure. One in two global shoppers are already buying preowned or refurbished items online, and the regenerative market, encompassing resale, rental and repair, is expected to be worth EUR 900 billion by 2030. Integrating these circular models introduces new operational complexity: items may exist in multiple states – new, used, refurbished or rented – each with its own logistics, pricing and accounting requirements. While few studies have quantified this directly, it follows that scaling such models effectively will require systems capable of unifying inventory management, reverse logistics and customer data within one coherent environment. In this sense, unified commerce provides the structural foundation that allows recommerce to move from experimental to mainstream. Personalisation combined with innovative payment options can further encourage sustainable choices, such as resale or repair, by making them as convenient and rewarding as buying new.
Returns are another pressure point, especially in fashion, where online return rates often hover around 25% to 30% depending on geography, product type and channel but can even be as high as 58% in some countries. Because AI-based sizing tools, virtual try-on features and behaviour-based return policies aim to reduce returns by improving fit accuracy and forecasting customer intent, their success depends on the quality and completeness of underlying data. It is therefore reasonable to infer that these technologies perform best when built on unified systems that consolidate purchase histories, product information and return behaviour across all channels. Studies on predictive fit models, such as SizeFlags, show that combining historical customer and product data can significantly reduce return rates, while unified platforms are shown to enhance returns management by providing a single view of orders, inventory and customer interactions.
Together, these trends form a reinforcing feedback loop: as retailers invest in AI-driven personalisation, social commerce, sustainability and smarter returns, they increase their dependence on a unified architecture. Unified commerce is not merely an upgrade to reduce complexity – it’s the platform upon which the next decade of retail innovation must be built.
