Connected Commerce Consulting

Digital commerce consulting is the work of deciding how a company sells across its channels: where demand will pool, which channel carries which job, what the customer’s context has to remember in between, and what any of it is worth. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, for companies including Bosch, Samsung, Scout24, Tchibo and Starbucks.

Omnichannel solved the wrong problem. Being present in every channel is not the same as remembering the customer between them. A buyer who researches on mobile, asks a question in a store and orders on desktop is treated as three customers by most commerce estates, because each channel holds its own context and none of it travels. Connected commerce is the practice of fixing that: running selling channels off one view of the customer, one view of inventory and one continuous record of what has already happened, so the experience carries forward rather than restarting at every surface.

• Since 1999demand, commercial and customer strategy
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• No platform tiesour commerce platform advice carries no commercial stake
• The Interaction Fieldwritten by our founder

Consistency is a supply-side win. Continuity is the one that compounds.

The omnichannel decade delivered consistency: the same brand, the same prices, the same catalog everywhere. That was worth doing, it was expensive, and it is finished.

What it did not deliver is continuity. Consistency makes the company easier to run. Continuity makes the customer easier to serve, and only the second one compounds, because only the second one makes the next interaction cheaper than the last. The symptoms are recognizable long before anyone calls them a strategy problem:

• The customer is asked for something the company already knows, often twice in the same week
• Channel P&Ls compete for the same customer and both report growth
• Service closes the contact without ever seeing what caused it
• Personalization runs on browsing history, because that is the only signal that reliably crosses systems

The honest version of the opposing argument is worth stating. Channel consistency is a real achievement and a precondition for most of what follows. What it cannot do by itself is change a commercial outcome, because a consistent estate with no memory still sells to a stranger every time. Our longer argument on this sits in our guide to unified commerce strategy.

When companies bring us in

• Every channel reports well and nobody can price a customer. The dashboards are healthy, and the question of what one customer is worth across all of them has no owner.
• Before a replatforming decision. A commerce platform is about to be chosen before anyone has named which commercial decisions it is meant to change.
• When a direct channel threatens an existing one. The D2C case is sound and the trade or retail partners who carry the volume today are the reason it keeps stalling.
• When personalization has plateaued. The tooling is in place, and the only signal available to it is behavior from one channel.
• When physical and digital are run as separate businesses. Two P&Ls, two roadmaps, and a customer who does not experience the distinction.

What our digital commerce consulting services include

Five capabilities sit in this group. Most engagements need two or three, and the first phase decides which, depending on whether the constraint is demand, the journey, the channel mix, the format or the prediction underneath it. Each one can be engaged on its own.

1. Commerce strategy

The question that sends you here: where does growth come from when buying traffic stops working? This is demand architecture rather than channel management, and it is the right starting point when acquisition cost has risen faster than margin for several years running. Our commerce strategy work establishes where future demand will pool, where you have permission to win, and what makes a customer choose you when an alternative is one tap away. Owning a demand space is a more defensible position than growing a category, and it changes every channel decision that follows.

2. Dynamic customer journey strategy

The question that sends you here: the journey map is accurate and the journey still restarts at every surface. A map is a description. What a connected estate needs is a journey built as an adaptive system, where what the customer did last changes what happens next. Our dynamic customer journey strategy work designs the handoffs, the retrieval and the decision points, which is where the click-light principle becomes measurable: fewer handoffs, less rebuilt context, a shorter path from intent to outcome.

3. Social commerce strategy

The question that sends you here: brand meaning and the transaction now occupy the same interaction, and your channel model still treats them as separate stages. Marketplaces and social platforms compress discovery, consideration and purchase into one surface owned by somebody else. Our social commerce strategy work decides which of those surfaces you sell on, what you give up in customer data and pricing control to be there, and what you keep direct.

4. Digital, experiential and physical retail

The question that sends you here: what is each format actually for, now that the store is rarely where the sale is recorded? When a format is judged on the revenue booked inside it, the estate drifts toward whichever one reports best. Our work on digital, experiential and physical retail assigns each format a job, in acquisition, in trial, in service or in relationship, and measures it on that job rather than on its own till. Our view on how far that has moved is in fluid retail.

5. Predictive and advanced analytics

The question that sends you here: which recurring commercial decision would change if you could predict it? Continuity produces signal, and signal is only worth what the decision was worth. Our predictive and advanced analytics work starts at the decision rather than the data: demand and sales forecasting, lifetime value and churn, propensity and next best action, price and promotion response, inventory and assortment. If nobody can say what a better version of the decision is worth, we say so before building the model.

How a connected commerce engagement works

1. Find where context stops. We trace a small number of real journeys across the estate and mark every point where the customer is asked something the company already knows, or where a channel acts without knowing what the last one did.
2. Price the continuity. What a customer is worth across all channels, what a preference premium is worth where the experience is genuinely better, and what the current breaks cost in service contacts, discount and lost repeat purchase. Continuity has to be argued in the same unit as everything else the board funds.
3. Assign the channel jobs. Which format and which channel carries acquisition, trial, service and relationship, what each is measured on, and where the current incentives reward keeping a customer inside one channel. The architecture follows this decision rather than preceding it.
4. Build the measurement line. Revenue from new demand spaces, price realized against preference, lifetime value, cost to serve and conversion, traced from the decision to the P&L. Channel reporting tells you where a sale was recorded, which is rarely where it was decided.

Where this has been done

Bosch: a direct channel that did not break the trade channel

Bosch’s professional tools business was built on retail and trade channel relationships, and entering direct commerce without a clear strategy risked channel conflict. For the PRO360 connected platform we built the direct-to-consumer channel strategy: a segmentation of professional users, a competitive positioning framework and a digital experience designed around how tradespeople actually buy and work. The strategy defined how a group with revenues above 88 billion euros could hold direct relationships with end users while protecting the partnerships that still carry the bulk of the volume. Read the full story of Bosch’s direct-to-consumer strategy for PRO360.

Tchibo: one retail estate, many channels

Tchibo had grown an unusual retail business, extending from coffee into a wide range of categories across more than 1,000 shops worldwide, and then found that customers had taken control of how they shopped and were moving between channels and devices at will. We built concepts and blueprints to bridge the gap between the online and offline sides of the business and to reimagine how the brand interacts with its customers. Read the full story of Tchibo’s customer engagement work.

Scout24: separate marketplaces turned into one platform

Scout24 was the umbrella brand over a set of digital marketplaces that had each built their own systems, and it wanted them integrated onto a common platform so the offering could be organized around customer needs rather than inherited categories. Using our DemandFirst research method we identified seven opportunity platforms at the intersection of consumer needs and offering features, pulled the sub-brands apart so each had a distinct role, and gave the company a roadmap for its digital business transformation. Read the full story of Scout24’s digital transformation.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for connected commerce

• We start at the demand, not the stack. A firm that starts from the technology will deliver consistency again, at a higher price, because that is what platforms are good at.
• We are not reselling a platform. No commerce platform or model provider partnership sits behind our recommendation, so the architecture advice is about your estate rather than our margin.
• We treat the channel P&L problem as part of the work. The architecture is usually the easier half. The incentives that reward keeping a customer inside one channel are the half that stops most programs.
• We measure in commercial units. Lifetime value, cost to serve and price realized against preference, rather than channel conversion and traffic, which are activity measures.

How to evaluate a digital commerce consultant

Worth asking of any firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask what they will do before choosing a platform. If the method begins with a technology selection, the output will be a more consistent estate with the same memory it has today.
• Ask which decisions the work is meant to change. If the answer is a set of dashboards rather than a set of decisions, the program will be judged on delivery and will change nothing commercially.
• Ask how they handle the channel P&L problem. A plan that assumes channel owners will cooperate against their own numbers is not a plan.
• Ask what they measure. Lifetime value, cost to serve and realized price are harder to produce than traffic and conversion, which is why most proposals offer the easier set.
• Ask who they are partnered with. A firm with a commercial relationship to a commerce platform or model provider is not a neutral advisor on which one you should use. That is structure, not dishonesty. We hold no such partnership.

Commerce strategy consultancy, systems integrator or commerce platform?

Related work

• Customer ecosystem strategy and Interaction Field design when the question is wider than selling, and partners and complements are part of the answer.
• Digital platforms and ecosystems strategy if the ambition is to run a market rather than to sell in one.
• Data strategy if the constraint is the state of the data rather than the state of the channel decisions.
• Machine learning, predictive analytics and AI strategy for model development and evaluation beyond the commercial decisions covered here.

This group sits inside our Business Technology Strategy practice at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field.

Digital commerce consulting in the US and worldwide

Our commerce work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Channel economics are market-specific in a way that architecture is not: the same direct channel that is additive in one market cannibalizes a dominant trade partner in another, and the formats customers expect differ by market even where the catalog does not. We scope by market and reuse the channel job model rather than the channel mix.