How Unicommerce is enabling brands across sectors in their ecommerce journey

From selling baby products to hosting yoga classes, the COVID-19 pandemic has led retailers to explore several opportunities online. According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report, the Indian retail industry is poised to reach $1 trillion by 2025, a huge jump from $750 billion in 2020.

Amidst the optimism, India’s retail boom has a new star — D2C brands. With more control over their sales, distribution channel and consumer data, these brands are giving e-commerce aggregators a run for their money.

Buoyed by these success stories, more businesses are looking to jump on the D2C bandwagon, but give up the idea due to business and technological complexities.

To that end, Unicommerce is helping e-commerce businesses take the D2C route with a supply-chain SaaS technology platform. The company helps businesses in automating supply chains and elevates consumers’ post-purchase experience. Unicommerce provides e-commerce enablement software for multichannel sales, inventory management, warehouse management, and omnichannel solutions.

Helping sellers navigate India’s e-commerce labyrinth

Founded in 2012, Unicommerce has grown rapidly to become the backbone of the e-commerce industry. It has served over 15,000 companies located across 300+ Indian cities and works with some of the biggest brands. It processes 20 percent of India’s e-commerce volumes.

Since the pandemic, the company has been on an expansion spree. Unicommerce has reported over a 100 percent increase in its enterprise business and over 300 percent growth in its D2C clientele.

The company currently manages 1,500+ stores and 6,000+ warehouses and processes over 1 million transactions daily, amounting to an annual GMV of $ 5+ billion. Its clientele includes marquee brands such as Myntra, Adidas, R for Rabbit, W, House of Anita Dongre, Forever New, Marico, Netmeds, Healthkart, Mamaearth, MCaffeine, SUGAR Cosmetics, Lakme, and Nivea, among others.

Unicommerce has 150+ pre-existing integrations, making it the preferred plug-and-play industry solution for e-tailers. To streamline backend operations, Unicommerce offers a plethora of solutions such as inventory and order management for error-free deliveries, warehouse management for smooth supply chain operations, logistics integration to ensure quicker delivery and minimised returns, returns management to drive customer stickiness, and consumer analytics to develop brand connect.

Providing seamless API integrations with a sector-agnostic focus

Last year, several leading FMCG brands such as ITC, Tata Consumer Products took the D2C route to counter slow offline retail sales due to the COVID-19 crisis, and many of them revamped their own websites to deliver products to consumers directly.

One of them is Marico, which launched Saffola Stores, an online D2C consumer platform. Unicommerce has been supporting these stores through e-commerce API integrations, faster operations, improving NPS, increased delivery accuracy and reducing the cost of logistics.

Post the collaboration, Marico achieved over 99.9 percent order fulfilment rate, 100 percent sales growth and grew its catalogue size by 52 percent. Plus, it was able to reduce its returns by 57 percent, lowered dispatch time from 24 to 2 hours, and scaled the number of daily orders from 10 to 1,000.

Home and lifestyle is another segment that dipped its toes in the e-commerce and D2C space, due to limited footfall in its physical stores. While consumers like shopping from the comfort of their homes, the experience of taking your time to shop at leisure is still important, and this is having an omnichannel presence helps.

Unicommerce's inventory and warehouse management solutions have helped brands like Hamilton Housewares Limited experience higher sales and better serviceability in more than 80 countries.

Hamilton (Milton, Treo, SpotZero & Claro) partnered with Unicommerce to manage and update their inventory in real-time, accurately handle warehouse operations, improve order fulfilment rates, analyse records and track process efficiency. The brand was able to reduce manual dependency and focus on core aspects of the business, while day-to-day operations were being managed by Unicommerce.

Today, with expanded reach, a highly satisfied customer base, and 1000+ SKUs live on multiple platforms, it has achieved a 99 percent order fulfilment rate, over 96 percent pick accuracy rate and 20 percent lower TAT.

Returns management simplified

In the fashion and lifestyle industry, much before in-store fitting rooms made an appearance in stores, returns were a common occurrence. Data suggests that 20 percent of products bought online are returned, compared to just 9 percent in brick-and-mortar stores. Managing returns comes with a complex set of operational challenges, including consumer expectations, process ownership, reverse logistics, and data limitations.

Unicommerce has specially crafted a returns management solution for brands to manage end-to-end order returns with complete efficiency. One such brand is TCNS Clothing Company, which has brands like W, Aurelia, Wishful and Eleven in its portfolio and has more than 3,500 point-of-sales across India.

With Unicommerce's seamless integration with the TCNS CRM, the brand has complete visibility of its reverse pickup status which helped it manage customer refunds, enhanced their productivity, while reducing the cost of operations and logistics.

It could manage a live catalogue size of over 150,000 items, centralizing an inventory of over 400,000 products across 18 sales channels. Plus, it dispatches 1.5 lakh orders per month, while achieving a 19 percent reduction in returns and secured 9x growth within two years, all from a single platform.

Riding on the growth wave with Unicommerce

The future of retail is definitely omnichannel. According to a report by Avendus, India's D2C market is going to be worth $100 billion in five years. The Shopify Future of Commerce Report also stated that retail merchants in India with an omnichannel strategy replaced 94 percent of point-of-sale (POS) purchases lost in the first month of the pandemic with online sales.

It's impossible for brands to maintain business continuity without strengthening their omnichannel strategies, investing in superior technology, and creating a mobile-first shopping experience.

Unicommerce has become the most preferred e-commerce solution for companies planning to digitise their e-commerce operations and looking to adopt D2C and omnichannel strategies. The company offers robust sector-agnostic solutions to suit the needs of every e-commerce seller, retailer, brand and business, thereby improving their unit economics and enabling exponential business growth.

Know more about how Unicommerce can help your brand stay on top of the ecommerce game.