With global ecommerce retail sales expected to reach 10.4 trillion USD by 2028, it’s clear that companies must embrace a digital-first approach to stay competitive today and in the future. Growing up in this environment, Generation Z has emerged over the past year as a major consumer group for online shopping, with total consumption estimated to reach 360 billion USD in 2025. The popularity of digital channels is also visible in other age groups. Millennials have maintained their position as the most active online shoppers, with 32% of them making most of their purchases online in the last five years. On the other hand, baby boomers have increasingly shopped online for the past decade already.

Considering today’s consumer behavior, it’s important to meet shoppers wherever they are with the right strategic approach. It’s no longer only a matter of multichannel or omnichannel strategies. Over the last years, optichannel and unified commerce have emerged as approaches that take customer experience optimization one step further.

Whether multichannel, omnichannel, optichannel, or unified commerce, your chosen strategy depends on your business goals and starting point. This article on different digital sales channels will help clarify the path you should take to put your sales and customer experience optimization plans into action.

 

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From multichannel to unified commerce: how have the strategies evolved?

Customers want more control over their purchasing experience. They use various channels to research and purchase their products: physical stores, ecommerce websites, online marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba, social media, mobile, email, etc. Businesses also attract customers via social ads, personalized email marketing, push notifications, live chat, and direct messaging to meet them seamlessly wherever they are. 46% of customers are willing to buy more if provided with personalized experiences, and companies, fearing not living up to expectations, are responding to consumer interests by implementing different digital sales channel strategies. The demand for a seamless experience also applies to the B2B sector. McKinsey’s B2B Pulse Survey reveals that more than half of respondents call for a true omnichannel experience and are willing to turn to another distributor if they don’t get it.

Different channel strategies have evolved over time, providing slightly different things:

  • Multichannel strategy: Having multiple disconnected, separate channels that all have their own strategy towards your product or service.
  • Omnichannel strategy: Having multiple integrated channels that work together for a unified customer experience.
  • Optichannel strategy: Utilizing data to provide the most impactful experiences through the optimal channel.
  • Unified commerce: Unifying backend systems and customer-facing channels into a comprehensive platform.

All businesses start with a multichannel strategy and a common-sense approach to choosing the channels that make the most sense for them. Later, the company will choose to continue with a basic multichannel strategy or move to more sophisticated and customer-oriented approaches like omnichannel and optichannel strategies or fully integrated unified commerce.

Let’s take a closer look at the different strategies.

 

What is a multichannel strategy?

Multichannel is the process of selling products through disconnected online and offline channels. A multichannel strategy expands your audience and gets more attention to your products. In many cases, channels are slightly integrated with similar products online and offline. For example, the business’s prices may differ between channels or inventory data could be missing or outdated. The lack of integration between channels can lead to a loss of sales. However, companies embracing a multichannel strategy don’t care about seamless channel integrations. They simply want to get eyes on their brand.

 

What is an omnichannel strategy?

An omnichannel strategy focuses on integrating channels for a unified experience across several contact points. Instead of working in parallel, the channels work together. Businesses that implement an omnichannel strategy guarantee the same customer experience across channels, with identical payment systems, information on pricing, user data, product availability, and more. In addition to improving customer experience, omnichannel heightens businesses’ ability to market and sell their products.

Omnichannel creates more opportunities to talk to customers. For instance, the in-store staff and remote customer service team possess the same data to help the customer along the way. If a product is out of stock in the store, the local team checks online whether the stock is available for delivery from other locations. In the end, they can still conclude a sale with the customer. While challenging to implement, creating a seamless and connected customer experience, like an omnichannel strategy, has become essential to winning customers.

Distribution and inventory management play an important role in the customer experience. For instance, Target has a robust omnichannel strategy that relies on sortation centers to streamline deliveries, and its Shipt same-day delivery services, which constantly explore new ways to improve the delivery experience. Additionally, the Target Circle 360 membership enhances the company’s omnichannel experience and customer engagement even further with perks like free same-day delivery and exclusive deals.

 

What is an optichannel strategy?

An omnichannel strategy already sounds quite comprehensive with its approach to unified experiences, but what is an optichannel strategy about? Is it even more sophisticated than omnichannel? An optichannel strategy provides the customer with the most optimized experience in the most optimized channel, just at the right time – based on the customer’s behavior and individual preferences.

Optichannel strategy focuses on optimization and efficiency – leveraging customer data and insights to deliver the most relevant experience possible through the best channel, rather than only trying to deliver a consistent experience across all channels.

Based on their preferences, customers can receive communication or advertising about products, services, or customer service through a specific channel (e.g., mobile notifications, email, or social media).

 

What is unified commerce?

Unified commerce refers to a strategy and a platform that seamlessly integrates your back-end systems (like sales channels, data, analytics and products) with your customer-facing channels (like online store, mobile app and social media) on a unified platform. Unified commerce provides companies with a comprehensive view of their business, helping to break down silos between systems and enabling them to optimize business operations and make decisions in a data-driven way. When it comes to customers, unified commerce leverages customer data and insights from integrated systems, offering a unified view of the customers and enabling retailers to deliver highly targeted and personalized experiences.

As an example of the power of unified commerce, a customer might find a product scrolling through on a social media platform, use a discount code provided by the company online, and track their shipment in real time. Suppose the product isn’t a good fit. In that case, they can return or exchange it in a physical store, where an employee can access their purchase history and offer personalized recommendations for additional sales. This modern, comprehensive and seamless customer experience connecting online and offline interactions, made possible by unified commerce, improves convenience and enhances customer loyalty.

Learn more about unified commerce »

 

Omnichannel, optichannel and unified commerce: common challenges

In the ideal scenario, every company would evolve from a multichannel approach to a more advanced and personalized strategy, but many businesses lack the resources.

There are a few main factors that can limit companies from putting more personalized and optimized digital channel strategies in place:

  1. Companies must rethink their organizational structure to evolve their strategic approach. This includes uniting commerce channels, blending specialized departments, and integrating multiple performance indicators and strategies.
  2. Companies need to overcome technical challenges to implement more advanced channel strategies, starting with integrating and creating an interconnected IT infrastructure where data flows across systems.
  3. Companies must find the right partners to integrate their business strategy, new solutions, and multiple channels.

Let’s take a closer look at the challenges:

Organizational challenges

Organizational challenges can disrupt a business’s goal to enter into new channels and achieve success with extended channel strategies. This issue often occurs because companies do not define their short-term and long-term digital commerce goals. Most ecommerce project teams spend their days working through a long list of backlog items rather than focusing on the activities that help them reach their digital goals. For this reason, companies should create and execute their digital roadmap to ensure they meet their KPIs.

The company must gather a stellar group of employees with the right incentives for new channel strategies to succeed. At the executive level, CMOs and CIOs need a unified vision and technical knowledge to implement new strategies, whether moving to an omnichannel, optichannel, or unified commerce approach. Especially with optichannel and unified commerce, data is at the heart of modern customer experience personalization and companies need to adopt data-driven methods, tools, and informed decision-making.

From top to bottom, employees must embrace ecommerce and other digital channels to move forward from a multichannel approach to more advanced strategies.Banner with an image of the Digital Strategy Roadmap on a tablet

Technological challenges

New sales channels emerge with each new technological leap. Whether you invest in omnichannel or optichannel strategies or even a unified commerce approach, developing the flexibility to implement and integrate new sales channels into your existing ones is very important.

Improving your digital channel strategy involves both technological and organizational issues. Old legacy systems often slow the pursuit of sales and personalization approaches, requiring time to integrate new tools and gather data across channels.

Businesses often adopt new technology and platforms to manage and understand their data. These systems can include an ecommerce platform, PIM, CDP, CMS, CRM, ERP, OMS, marketing automation platform, payment gateways, etc. All systems involved in the customer journey need to be integrated to deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience across channels. This consistency is key for all of the three different approaches.

However, seamless omnichannel experiences also require an advanced approach to customer data management. With siloed customer data and the lack of a centralized view of the customer, businesses might miss their chances of delivering personalized experiences. Today, a customer data platform is an efficient tool for companies to provide more relevant and timely engagement across all channels.

With optichannel, the center of attention shifts to offering customized and optimized experiences for which gathering and utilizing customer data is essential. Unified commerce goes even further with an integrated system and a channel-combining platform that supports data synchronization, advanced personalization, and unified backend operations.

Consistency defines a well-orchestrated digital channel experience, where clients find the same products, payment options, personalization capabilities, and more across channels. Reaching this kind of consistency, optimization, and unified operations requires finding and working with the right solution partners.

Partner Challenges

Whether you want a frictionless experience between physical and online stores, the exact right advertising in the right channel, a cross-channel platform that delivers actionable insights for personalization, or a robust platform that unifies your back-end systems and customer-facing channels, it’s crucial to find a partner with the skills and expertise to implement and integrate new technology.

A partner’s credentials also show how much they know and their respect in the field. Suppose you’re interested in moving your business onto a new ecommerce platform or setting up a system for customer data collection or product data management. You need to find the right partner to define and execute your strategy. In that case, you need to consider a few questions:

  • What is the partner’s experience delivering digital solutions? How many years and in how many industries, locally and globally?
  • What is the partner’s delivery success rate of digital projects?
  • Is the partner recognized in the community?
  • Can you cover all of your company’s digital solution needs with that one partner?

You can also check whether the partner or its clients received any industry awards, as this often demonstrates the success and quality of their projects.

 

Choosing the right digital channel strategy

It’s clear that businesses benefit from attracting shoppers on various channels, and in 2025, it’s essential to pursue a scalable and future-proof channel strategy. Companies looking to implement these advanced strategies should weigh which approach to adopt. As for omnichannel, optichannel and unified commerce, companies must solve the issues related to people, technology, and partnerships to get on the right path. Once the pieces are in place, integrating various data streams will help your team adjust and personalize your customer experiences.

Consider the following factors when choosing your approach:

  • The multichannel strategy approach is a simpler option for companies that might not have the luxury of vast resources but still offer multiple, unintegrated channels to reach their customers. This strategy could work for B2B companies without completely disrupting digital sales channels.
  • The omnichannel approach allows companies to offer integrated and seamless customer experiences across their many channels. However, implementing this unified experience requires more of the company’s resources.
  • The optichannel solution aims for optimized results. This approach utilizes data from individual channels to get the best possible results and, therefore is more costly to adopt and use.
  • Unified commerce is the most complex of these strategies, as it combines the fruits of the strategy mentioned. For larger companies, however, this approach is the go-to choice for getting a unified platform that combines backend systems with customer-facing channels and offers a holistic view of the customers with endless possibilities.

 

How Vaimo can help

Vaimo is one of the world’s most respected experts in digital commerce and customer experiences. We deliver strategy, design, development, and managed services to brands, retailers and manufacturers all over the world.

We have a 15+ year track record of technical excellence and proven results in helping our clients succeed with business development, digital strategy and customer experience. We have the expertise to help you find and implement the right digital channel strategies and supporting solutions.

Are you interested in finding out which strategic approach would best help your company deliver the best customer experiences and results?

Talk to our experts today »