The traditional brick-and-mortar retail store is undergoing a transformation, evolving from a transaction point into a sophisticated command center designed to enhance visibility, deepen engagement and improve operational efficiency.
At the forefront of this shift is the concept of unified commerce.
Nikki Baird, vice president of Strategy and Product at Aptos, an enterprise solution provider exclusively focused on the retail industry, told PYMNTS as part of the “Summer School” series that macro-level pressure is spurring retailers to re-examine the pain points of their operations.
“Tariffs are top of mind,” she told PYMNTS, because retailers “can’t operate with such a level of uncertainty — and they’re doing everything they can to really establish certainty around cost.”
Merchants have found themselves scrambling to pull in product ahead of potential new tariffs. Consumers have already pulled forward spending in prior months. There’s a mismatch in terms of supply and demand.
Commerce transcends the mere act of selling to consumers; it is fundamentally about “connecting customers to products,” she said.
Baird emphasized the critical duality of this connection: “A lot of companies that talk about unified commerce are really only talking about the commerce piece of it, like selling to consumers. And you can be the greatest company in the world with the most rabid fans, but if you can’t get product to them, you are not going to be successful.”
True unified commerce necessitates bringing together all the disparate operational pieces required to facilitate this connection, extending beyond the isolated silos of eCommerce, order management or traditional point of sale.
The absence of connectivity across channels often results in significant friction points within the physical store, directly impacting the customer experience and transaction integrity, Baird said.
She highlighted a common scenario prevalent in many retail environments: “Some retailers today are still using an iPad to look up a customer … They go to a completely different iPad to place an order for inventory that’s not in the store that they want secured for that customer.”
This cumbersome, multi-device approach is then often followed by the need to ring up a separate cash-and-carry transaction that the consumer brought to the till initially.
Such disconnected processes are not merely inefficient; they jeopardize sales. As Baird told PYMNTS, “Anytime you leave the consumer with time to think about ‘Do I really want this purchase? Am I really willing to stand here and wait for this store associate to go through all of this stuff?’ You’re putting that transaction in jeopardy.”
A modern POS system can serve as the “operating system of the store,” she said, enabling associates to seamlessly facilitate connection, thereby safeguarding transactions.
Aptos One: A Unified Platform for Seamless Retail Operations
To address these prevalent pain points and enable genuine unified commerce, Aptos developed Aptos One.
“We designed Aptos One as a mobile-first, enterprise-grade POS application that is built on a cloud-native and microservices-based unified commerce platform. Our intent was really universal services,” she said. That means workflows and microservices used for in-store order placement for out-of-stock inventory are precisely the same ones utilized by a customer service representative placing an order from a call center through an order management system.
This approach directly tackles the inefficiencies tied to brick-and-mortar operations.
“A lot of the complexity that retailers face today is from that duplication of capabilities across different systems that were never designed to support unified commerce and pulling those into the platform so that they can be reused across touchpoints,” Baird said.
Despite prolonged discussions surrounding mobile strategies in retail, their successful deployment within stores remains a persistent challenge for many, Baird contended.
Beyond technical reliability, there is also cultural and operational resistance. Many retailers shy away from a “cash register-less” model, believing such an approach is exclusive to tech giants like Apple. But as consumers become increasingly mobile in their daily lives, their expectations for in-store interactions have evolved. “The consumer expects their store associates to be mobile just as much as they are themselves,” Baird said, reinforcing the notion that a mobile-first strategy is no longer optional but a fundamental expectation.
Future Trajectories: AI Integration and Enhanced in-Store Service
Noting the pervasive impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on retail, Baird said that a substantial portion of Aptos’ innovation efforts is dedicated to embedding data and sales chatbots directly into its solutions, providing query capabilities and feedback to store associates, managers and higher organizational levels. This immediate, data-driven feedback, facilitated by AI, has the potential to dramatically impact business performance. Beyond performance metrics, Aptos is also enhancing the in-store experience by creating an eCommerce-like feel for sales associates when assisting customers. This includes making inventory searching, product lookups and customer history retrieval more intuitive and seamless.
“If you have brick-and-mortar, you have to get that right. That’s what the modern point of sale helps you do,” Baird told PYMNTS.
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