Unified Commerce for Retail Innovation with MongoDB Atlas

Unified commerce is often touted as a transformative concept, yet it represents a long-standing challenge for retailers—disparate data sources and siloed systems. It’s less of a revolutionary concept and more of a necessary shift to make long-standing problems more manageable. Doing so provides a complete business overview—and enables personalized customer experiences—by breaking down silos and ensuring consistent interactions across online, in-store, and mobile channels. Real-time data analysis enables targeted content and recommendations.

Unified commerce boosts operating efficiency by connecting systems and automating processes, reducing manual work, errors, and costs, while improving customer satisfaction. Positive customer experience results in repeat customers, improving revenue, and reducing the cost of customer acquisition. MongoDB Atlas offers a robust foundation for unified commerce, addressing critical challenges within the retail sector and providing capabilities that enhance customer experience, optimize operations, and foster business growth.

Figure 1. Customer touchpoints in the retail ecosystem.

Retail businesses are shifting to a customer-centric and data-driven approach by unifying the customer journey for a seamless, personalized experience that builds loyalty and growth. While retail has long relied on omnichannel strategies with stores, websites, apps, and social media, these often involve separate systems, causing fragmented experiences and inefficiencies.

Unified commerce, integrating physical and digital retail via a unified data platform, is a necessary evolution for retailers facing challenges with diverse platforms and data silos. Cloud-based data architectures, AI, and event-driven processing can overcome these hurdles, enabling enhanced customer engagement, optimized operations, and revenue growth. This integration delivers a frictionless customer experience crucial in today's digital marketplace.

Figure 2. Enabling a customer-centric approach with unified commerce.

MongoDB Atlas for unified commerce

MongoDB Atlas provides a strong foundation for unified commerce, addressing key challenges in the retail sector and offering capabilities that enhance customer experience, optimize operations, and drive business growth.

MongoDB's flexible document model allows retailers to consolidate varied data, eliminating data silos. This provides consistent, real-time information across all channels for enhanced customer experiences and better decision-making. In MongoDB diverse data can store without rigid schemas, enabling quick adaptation to changing needs and faster integration of siloed physical and digital systems.

Figure 3. Unified customer 360 using MongoDB.

Real-world adoption: Lidl, part of Schwarz group, implemented an automatic stock reordering application for branches and warehouses, addressing complex data and high volumes to improve supply chain efficiency through real-time data synchronization.

Real-time data synchronization for enhanced Cx

In retail, real-time processing of customer interactions is crucial. MongoDB's Change Streams and event-driven architecture allow retailers to capture and react to customer behavior instantly. This enables personalized experiences like dynamic pricing, instant order updates, and tailored recommendations, fostering customer loyalty and driving conversions.

Figure 4. Real-time data in the operational data layer for enhanced customer experiences.

Atlas change streams and triggers enable real-time data synchronization across retail channels, ensuring consistent inventory information and preventing overselling on both physical and e-commerce platforms.

Real-world adoption: CarGurus uses MongoDB Atlas to manage vast amounts of real-time data across its platform and support seamless, personalized user experiences both online and in person. The flexible document model helps them handle diverse data structures required for their automotive marketplace.

Scalability & high traffic retail

MongoDB Atlas's cloud-native architecture provides automatic horizontal scaling, enabling retailers to manage demand fluctuations like seasonal spikes and product expansions without impacting performance, which is crucial for scaling unified commerce.

MongoDB Atlas' auto-scaling and multi-cloud features allow retailers to handle traffic spikes during peak periods(holiday, flash sales) without downtime or performance issues. The platform automatically adjusts resources based on demand, ensuring responsiveness and availability, which is vital for positive customer experiences and maximizing sales.

Figure 5. Highly scalable MongoDB Atlas for high-traffic retail.

Real-world adoption: Commercetools modernized its composable commerce platform using MongoDB Atlas and MACH architecture and achieved amazing throughput for Black Friday. This demonstrates Atlas's ability to handle high-volume retail events through its scalability features.

AI and analytics integration

MongoDB Atlas enables retailers to gain actionable insights from unified commerce data by integrating with AI and analytics tools. This facilitates personalized shopping, predictive inventory, and targeted marketing across online and offline channels through data-driven decisions.

Personalization is a key driver of customer engagement and conversion in the retail industry. MongoDB Atlas Search, with its full-text and vector search capabilities, enables retailers to deliver intelligent product recommendations, visual search experiences, and AI-powered assistants. By leveraging these advanced search and AI capabilities, retailers can help customers find the products they're looking for quickly and easily, provide personalized recommendations based on their interests and preferences, and create a more intuitive and enjoyable shopping experience.

Real-world adoption: L'Oréal improved customer experiences through personalized, inclusive, and responsible beauty across several apps. Retailers on MongoDB Atlas can leverage its unstructured data capabilities, vector search, and AI integrations to create real-time, AI-driven applications.

Seamless data integration

Atlas offers ETL/CDC connectors and APIs to consolidate diverse retail data into a unified operational layer. This single source of truth combines inventory, customer, transaction, and digital data from legacy systems, enabling consistent omnichannel experiences and eliminating data silos that hinder unified commerce.

Figure 6. MongoDB Atlas for unified commerce.

Real-world adoption: MongoDB helps global retailers, like Adeo, unify cross-channel data into an operational layer for easy synchronization across online and physical platforms, enabling better customer experiences.

Advanced search capabilities

MongoDB Atlas provides built-in text and vector search capabilities, enabling retailers to create advanced search experiences for enhanced product discovery and personalization across online and physical channels.

Figure 7. Integrated search capabilities in MongoDB.

Real-world adoption: MongoDB's data platform with integrated search enables retailers to improve customer experience and unify commerce. Customers like Albertsons use this for both customer-facing and back-office operations.

Composable architecture with data mesh principles

MongoDB supports a composable architecture that aligns with data mesh principles, enabling retailers to build decentralized, scalable, and self-service data infrastructure. Using a domain-driven design approach, different teams within the organization can manage their own data products (e.g., customers, orders, inventory) as independent services. This approach promotes agility, scalability, and data ownership, allowing teams to innovate and iterate quickly while maintaining data integrity and governance.

Figure 7. MongoDB Atlas enables domain-driven design for the retail enterprise data foundation.

Global distribution

For international retailers using unified commerce, Atlas provides low-latency global data access, ensuring fast performance and data sovereignty compliance across multiple markets.

MongoDB Atlas enables retailers to distribute data globally across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure regions as needed, building distributed and multi-cloud architectures for low-latency customer access worldwide.

Figure 8. Serving always-on, globally distributed, write-everywhere apps with MongoDB Atlas global clusters.

Use cases: How unified commerce transforms retail

Unified commerce streamlines the retail experience by integrating diverse channels into a cohesive system. This approach facilitates customer interactions across online and physical stores, enabling features such as real-time inventory checks, personalized recommendations based on purchase history regardless of the transaction location, and frictionless return processes. The objective is to create a seamless and efficient shopping journey through interconnected and collaborative functionalities using a modern data platform that enables the creation of such a data estate.

Always-stocked shelves & knowing what's where:

• Real-time inventory

• Offer online ordering with delivery or pickup, providing stock estimates

• Store staff use real-time inventory to help customers and order, minimizing out-of-stocks

Treating customers as individuals is a key aspect of Retail. Retail Enterprises need a unified view of customer data to offer personalized recommendations, offers, and content and offer dynamic pricing based on loyalty and market factors. Engaging customers on their preferred channels with consistent messaging and superior service builds lasting relationships.

Seamless order orchestration is crucial, providing flexible fulfillment options (delivery, BOPIS, curbside, direct shipping) and keeping customers informed with real-time updates. Optimizing inventory across stores and warehouses ensures speedy, accurate fulfillment. Along with fulfillment, frictionless returns are vital, offering in-store returns for online purchases, efficient tracking, and immediate refunds.

In the digital space, intelligent search and discovery are essential. Advanced search, image-based search, and AI chatbots simplify product discovery and support, boosting conversion rates and brand engagement. Leading retailers leverage MongoDB Atlas for these capabilities, powering AI recommendations, real-time inventory, and seamless omnichannel customer journeys to improve efficiency and satisfaction.

The future of unified commerce

To remain competitive, retailers should adopt flexible, cloud-based systems. MongoDB Atlas facilitates this transition, enabling unified commerce through real-time data, AI search, and scalable microservices for enhanced customer experiences and innovation.