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As marketers and brand guardians, we’ve classically learned about the purchase funnel and its journey. Tell a lot of people that your product exists, expect them to compare it to others, help them buy it, maybe more than once. You then hope buyers tell their friends so that you don’t have to. Our work has always been about driving as many people as possible towards the buy.

We’ve typically compartmentalized the above process into slices with dedicated KPIs, budgets and partners. Meanwhile, I just bought a pair of jogger pants in two clicks on Instagram last night because Netflix rarely captures my full attention.

The truth is, the funnel and its journey have never been linear or organized, and today, modern commerce can happen anywhere, any time. The explosion of ecommerce is proof of that. People are shopping digitally more than ever before—83% of the U.S. population do so today according to eMarketer. New behaviors are forming as 68% of consumers say they will keep on using curbside pick-up post-pandemic per Global Data Retail. eMarketer expects 100 million people to have bought something from social channels by 2023—that’s a lot of jogger pants.

For this reason, I’d argue marketers should replace the commerce funnel with the digital commerce stack. Like a tech stack, which aggregates all services pulled together to build a single application, every element of the commerce stack should contribute to one end goal—in this case, facilitating buys, regardless of touchpoint or discipline.

So how do you build a digital commerce stack? Start with the 3 Cs and you’re well on your way.

Components: A true collective

According to proprietary Publicis Commerce research conducted across 80+ Fortune 250 brands worldwide, the top organizational key performance indicator (KPI) is sales, but 79.6% of interactions with agencies focus on just the marketing components. While still important, it’s also essential to provide them with exposure to your sales organization. Rounding out your group and focus will drive commerce thinking throughout your organization.

Build a commerce collective that includes representation, tracking and accountability from marketing, sales, ecommerce, trade marketing and research/insights with a direct line to finance and operations. That way, decisions are made with the right inputs, sign offs and accountability, from start to finish.

Capabilities: being ready to close

51% of chief marketing officers surveyed by Salesforce in 2019 saw Amazon as an existential threat to their business. Since then, the commerce ecosystem has diversified and matured considerably. Facebook recently announced “Shops” is bringing unified and robust commerce back end to brands and influencers. Google brought its full search philosophy to its shopping tab, leveraging organic and paid to create a broader, more credible response to a customer query. Major publishing houses are implementing purchase functionality directly into their editorial material, so you never have to leave the page. Efforts like this are changing the game of ecommerce and making it easier than ever to purchase with just a click or two.

You can buy from anywhere, so every channel is ultimately a storefront. It’s important for everyone touching commerce to see their channel or area of responsibility as a storefront within a network of franchise stores, not a slice in a greater funnel. The question then is, how are you optimizing your “storefronts” to close a potential shopper then and there?

It starts at trade agreements —are you securing access to physical and digital properties that give consumers enough information to pull the trigger? When it comes to channels typically categorized for brand building, are you providing an outlet to turn enthusiasm into a purchase? And when it comes to replenishment channels, are you inspiring upsells and cross-sells?

Empower every member of your expanded commerce team to think and behave like an entrepreneur by giving them sales KPIs to reach and the autonomy to bring in solutions to make their operation shine. Teams whose work classically only involved awareness should have sales data and a line of sight to conversion. Those managing e-retailers should have access to creative teams able to optimize their content for conversion. That way, each of these newly appointed brand properties can be more self-sufficient as sales generators.

Controls: staying efficient through constant optimization

Once you have a broad, multi-disciplinary team that contributes to one commerce conversation, whose members operate their micro-businesses as freestanding commerce operations, staying coordinated is key. Bringing together a group of this type will lead to a wealth of data that the team must standardize, share in real-time and built from as a whole set.

Data liquidity should be high and constant amongst the collective, but its deeper analysis should be the foundation of regular discussions.

There are two key moments to optimize the stack. First, it’s important to connect monthly to coordinate projects and see how disciplines can complement one another by sharing data and best practices. Second, be sure to include finance in ongoing discussions to drive autonomy and accountability further. Make it a point to complement your own efforts with perspective from the outside. Self-audits audits conducted by commerce strategists—coupled with joint sessions where partners can make measurable proposals—will allow you and your collective to turn results from finance-led sessions into new actions. That will yield new data and business results.

The truth is the funnel looked great on paper, and its philosophy is sound. However, for an organization to reflect how commerce happens today and be agile enough to respond to how it shapes up to be in the future, it comes down to a stack of autonomous and empowered specialists driven by common principles and processes, all working towards their own “buys.”

Publicis Commerce offers advertising, media and marketing services. Its areas of expertise include strategy, media investment, shopper marketing, technology and innovation, marketing and operations.

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