Autor Antonio Gilabert

All the safety measures with which millions of people live to respect social distancing are causing a real problem for continuity in companies whose business model the number of sales in physical stores has a lot of weight. If we look at what happened in the US during this year 2020, so far 27 companies have declared bankruptcy elargely due to their strategy in the offline model:

Fuente: https://www.retaildive.com/news/the-running-list-of-2020-retail-bankruptcies/571159/

This situation is also showing us that the other side of the coin, digital commerce, is re-emerging as a necessary and mandatory platform for the viability of the Retail business. This new reality, in addition to requiring retailers to have an ecommerce prepared not only to take on incremental demands or requests without performance penalties, it is forcing them to offer the customer an experience both in catalog and in services similar to what they could get in stores or physical establishments. Furthermore, the customer demands to be able to make purchases both online and offline with little difficulty, offering the so fashionable experience of “omnichannel”.

For several months and thanks to the satisfactory experience acquired in one of our clients, at Axazure we have started the first steps to promote in a more direct way the provision of the service with the new business line, Dynamics 365 Commerce.

After the successful implementation in a physical store of our first Retail client and analyzing the market needs with the current situation, we have spent months studying the options offered by the new Dynamics 365 Commerce product, exploring all the capabilities it offers together with the Dynamics 365 platform.

Commerce Scale Unit as the brain of operations

• Retailers are distributed companies where the business topography can be very dynamic and different, which is why this component is important. The Commerce Scale Unit figure will operate as a central integration point for all the commerce business logic that can be established, which allows a complete omnichannel solution without dependencies on physical stores or online, even enabling integrations with external solutions.

Interconnected business processes

• Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management rely on Commerce to improve the sales process, therefore the benefit and interconnection is immediate as it is the same platform. A clear example of this native connectivity that we are currently experiencing in open opportunities is what we have been able to offer with the functionality called DOM (Distributed Order Management) where through an intelligent administration of orders, it is optimized compliance and allocation of these, providing the company with visibility of its inventory in real time and through all its channels.

Unified data and Artificial Intelligence

• Dynamics 365 Commerce provides native integrations with Common Data Service and Azure Data Lake Storage. The application on the latter of analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning will be key points when it comes to designing KPIs or strategic business indicators to optimize sales according to the different channels.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection

• The possibility of being able to implement an anti-fraud strategy under the same Commerce Scale Unit umbrella, where the system is able to identify possible fraudulent transactions based on business rules, provides high added value in relation to the competition.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

• The circle closes with the possibility of getting to know customers in a deeper way through the connection of data from different transactional, behavioral and observation sources to create 360 ​​views. This operation includes analysis of rates of purchase abandonment and of course, it helps to offer customers more personalized shopping experiences.

We have always supported Microsoft with the trend of exploiting Dynamics 365 platform instead of individual products, and now more than ever, from Axazure we are getting down to work in order to offer the channel a highly experienced team with this type of Commerce scenarios so necessary in times that we live.