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February 21, 2014
If your business can’t personalize the user experience of your commerce site to individual consumers as they are using it, and provide a consistent experience across all of your brand’s touch-points, you will lose them.
Consumers must be continually engaged with a customized experience at every opportunity – regardless of what path they take through your site. Done well, it may also trigger different behaviors that lead to increased opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling, as well as enticing a customer to return.
This is omni-channel engagement, and it has become the game-changer for online retail. It’s also fundamental to Oracle Commerce.
A personalized, omni-channel customer experience has two sides. The first is the basic framework – a robust product catalogue that can lever your customer history, and provide a hassle-free checkout. The second is the additional layer of insight that can quickly adapt and respond to what the consumer is doing on your site – search terms they are using, banners or links they are clicking on, and so forth – so that your site is dynamic rather than static, displaying content specific to the consumer’s interests in real time.
The ability to identify and rapidly respond to a consumer’s immediate interests and actions, cost-effectively, can make or break a profit margin. It requires a single, unified solution, powerful and intuitive enough for the typical business users in your marketing department to quickly update or add new content without having to rely on the IT department.
In the enterprise market, Oracle has emerged as the frontrunner for empowering business users to provide this customized, omni-channel experience, with acquisitions that include Endeca, ATG, Vitrue, FatWire and RightNow. RealDecoy has had a front-row seat throughout this evolution, and has extensive experience working with all the pieces of this puzzle.
With Oracle Commerce, Oracle has unified ATG and Endeca, and is developing strategic integrations with the others, in order to rapidly evolve commerce sites to new levels of interaction and personalization.
Oracle Commerce allows retailers to target their customers with a level of detail far in advance of what has been possible with other integrated solutions. Your business users can offer customers a true omni-channel experience that will drive repeat sales.
What does this mean for existing ATG users?
Oracle is only supporting ATG for versions 10.2 and earlier and is no longer distributing ATG Search as of Version 11. This means existing ATG users should already be thinking about upgrading their ATG deployments to Oracle Commerce. Fortunately, to do so means added value. With Oracle Commerce, ATG users can improve the customer experience with enhanced search, greater functionality and personalization. Business users can quickly update or add content, without having to rely on their web developers and IT departments, as typical commerce systems would require.
What does this mean for existing Endeca users?
Upgrading to the full Oracle Commerce suite is an option for Endeca users, not a necessity. However, Oracle Commerce can give them access to the tools and functionality that ATG brings to the table for product catalogues, customer segmentation and web integration. With the additional feature integrations also available in Oracle Commerce, Endeca users can further enhance customer experience management and personalization.
What about those who have never used Endeca or ATG?
This is the opportunity to implement a robust, omni-channel commerce and customer-experience solution with a clean slate. The possibilities to transform your online sales channel are vast, and can be quickly obtained with a phased implementation.
But that’s not all …
Now, consider being able to manage, analyze and act on the insight to be mined from all of your structured and unstructured data, to chart buying trends and customer behaviors over time, and to factor in variables, such as weather conditions, that could impact your business. If you layer this insight on top of Oracle Commerce, imagine the possibilities. We do at RealDecoy, with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery.
Talk to us about how all of Oracle’s capabilities and insight can be brought to bear for your online retail business.