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Fashion Rretailer replatforms online presence to personalise shopping, improve site speed and increase sales

"As we continue to grow sales worldwide, the Oracle solution will enable us to personalize and enhance the customer experience online, streamline service and introduce more international sites."

News article based on American Red Cross release

Stacey Shulman, chief information officer and head of e-commerce for American Apparel: "We had anticipated four times the traffic from Cyber Monday 2011, but we ended up with 20 times the traffic," she says.

As the East Coast prepared for Superstorm Sandy, the American Red Cross's new cloud platform allowed users in the storm's path to read customized preparedness warnings and shelter information, based on their location, as they checked the organization's homepage. And when Americans reached into their pockets after the storm, a scalable ecommerce platform allowed the organization to handle as many as 75,000 concurrent donations - the most ever. The American Red Cross is merging its 400-500 chapter websites, under a new cloud platform, from Oracle Corp. , that allows the organization to scale up its capacity when a disaster strikes and users are clamoring for preparedness information, Craig Oldham, vice president of digital engagement told CIO Journal. The platform, which the Red Cross began rolling out in August, was already implemented by half its chapters by the time the storm struck. The ability to scale up allowed the Red Cross to handle a peak of more than 500,000 page views per minute, during a NBC telethon to draw donations for the relief effort in early November...

To keep pace with strong and consistent online growth, American Apparel has replaced an internally-built infrastructure with Oracle ATG Web Commerce, "to get the scalability we need," stated Stacey Shulman, CIO of American Apparel, "as well as an agile platform for providing better service to our customers."

December 2012 sales increased more than 59 percent over December 2011, and it was the highest sales month in the history of the company's online business

"As we continue to grow sales worldwide, the Oracle solution will enable us to personalize and enhance the customer experience online, streamline service and introduce more international sites," says Stacey Shulman, CIO, American Apparel.

Since launching a new e-commerce platform, American Apparel has continued to deliver an increase in e-commerce sales, with a more than 38 percent increase over the same period last year.

With several hundred web sites for its local chapters migrated to a single e-commerce platform in 2012, the American Red Cross put the new site to the test during Hurricane Sandy last October. "Sandy was our first big crisis on the new site, and the site's performance exceeded our expectations," says Craig Oldham, the charity's vice president of digital strategy

Scalability, Performance of ATG Web Commerce as an Oracle Managed Cloud Service Supports 500,000 Page Requests Per Minute During Hurricane Sandy Telethon

"When large scale disasters happen, it can trigger web site volumes on a scale similar to what retailers experience on Black Friday," said Craig Oldham, VP of Digital Strategy for American Red Cross, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. 

...Throughout Cyber Monday and other peak shopping days, Shulman says, the retailer's new technology platform did what American Apparel had expected: provide the flexibility and scalability to handle sudden spikes in traffic and sales. "We never questioned Oracle's ability to scale," Shulman says. "Without it, we wouldn't have made it through the last holiday season. Most certainly, we would have crashed."

SurfStitch, Australia's leading online surf and fashion retailer, has chosen to extend the use of Oracle ATG Web Commerce to support its growing international presence and the expansion of its brand portfolio. Launching as Australia's first online retailer for surf and fashion in 2008, SurfStitch has grown rapidly through its passion for providing exceptional customer service and an extensive brand offering that includes all well known surf brands, such as Billabong, Quiksilver, RipCurl, Volcom, Nixon and many others.