To help retailers improve customer service and increase efficiency, Oracle introduced Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service, a mobile extension to Oracle Retail Point-of-Service (POS) that enables store associates to assist customers and securely complete transactions from anywhere in the store using mobile devices
Canadian retailer offering luggage, handbags and accessories, has selected Oracle Retail solutions to optimize operations and establish an integrated, scalable platform to help drive growth
"As Bentley continues to expand throughout Canada, we need to upgrade and integrate our core merchandising and supply chain systems to support ongoing profitable growth," said Dominic Breton, vice president of merchandise planning and information technology, The Bentley Group.
South African fashion retailer has implemented Oracle ATG Web Commerce applications to underpin its new cross-channel commerce offering which went live early this summer.
Mobile POS is becoming increasingly more popular among both consumers and retailers as it speeds and simplifies checkout, eliminates lines, reduces costs and helps keep personnel out in the store, talking with customers
Omni-channel growth and international expansion are fueling investment in technology that connects the entire retail organization with the consumer in both virtual and physical environments
What follows is a compendium of educated guesses and forecasts, and the editors at STORES would like to think that most of them have value. Still, if we had to sum up our expectations for 2013 in one word, it would be "convergence" - tying together the web, Big Data, analytics, mobile, social and all things digital to deliver a seamless experience to shoppers...
STORES' annual predictions feature is the result of months spent absorbing and processing the insights of numerous retail experts. STORES wishes to acknowledge the individuals and organizations who generously shared their time and views on key topics... David Dorf and Michael Webster, Oracle; Gary Penn, QuikSilver; Michael Haydock, IBM; Brian Kilcourse, Retail Systems Research
Retail IT is being transformed. CIOs are shifting from proprietary systems to package solutions and from an emphasis on cost reduction to a solid bump in IT capital spending. A strong customer focus means CIOs are fixing their attention on channel integration and analytics that will help them spot and anticipate shopper preferences more quickly.
"Talking about re-engineering the foundation of retail IT may not be the sexy side of technology, but it's critical," Webster says. "If a company jumps into mobile-assisted in-store selling ... but doesn't have accurate visibility of inventory across the enterprise, what have they accomplished?"
That's a point of view echoed by Gartner vice president of research Jeff Roster. "The big attack has to be on infrastructure," he says. "There are still a whole lot of retail companies out there that need to retire legacy systems and get out of the proprietary code writing business. Once they move to packaged systems, the opportunity to decrease infrastructure costs and reshape the business around today's customer can move forward at a quicker pace."
In fact, in a scorecard published last month by Oracle Corp., 93 percent of C-level executives believe their organizations are losing revenue - as much as 10 percent per year, an average of $50.5 million - by not being able to fully leverage the information they collect. Among retail executives, 30 percent give their organization a "D"or "F" in preparedness to manage the data deluge...
"Recent research from Oracle reveals another benefit of live chat - it enables consumers to multi-task while holding a conversation instead of waiting at the end of a phone line."
More than half of consumers in the United States and Canada regularly use two or more channels before they make a purchase and they expect a consistent experience across all channels, according to a new survey from Oracle.
... If you think enthusiasm for newer channels is turning the store into a quaint relic of a bygone era, think again. Three-quarters of surveyed consumers say they go to the store to see the product prior to purchase, and 44% go when they need the product right away.
When it comes to making purchases online, 45 percent of consumers age 18 - 34 who own a smartphone will use it to purchase products online as often as a few times each week.