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"Oracle Commerce gives us the ability to bring more exciting products and promotional offers to our customers," said Steven Hunter, EVP and CIO of Stage Stores. "I've been involved in the deployment of several e-commerce platforms. The Oracle Commerce implementation was less than six months in core project time. This was a quick implementation and one of the smoothest."

"Oracle Commerce gives us the ability to bring more exciting products and promotional offers to our customers," said Steven Hunter, EVP and CIO of Stage Stores. "I've been involved in the deployment of several e-commerce platforms. The Oracle Commerce implementation was less than six months in core project time. This was a quick implementation and one of the smoothest."

"Oracle Commerce allows Stage Stores to deliver on its "commerce anywhere" promise by improving the customer experience across all devices, offering more personalized recommendations and delivering more effective product cross-sells and up-sells. Guided search capabilities help ensure consumers receive relevant and accurate search results and enables Stage Stores to highlight relevant products and promotions."

"Oracle Commerce allows Stage Stores to deliver on its "commerce anywhere" promise by improving the customer experience across all devices, offering more personalized recommendations and delivering more effective product cross-sells and up-sells. Guided search capabilities help ensure consumers receive relevant and accurate search results and enables Stage Stores to highlight relevant products and promotions."

"To extend its "commerce anywhere" strategy, Stage Stores has implemented Oracle Commerce. The initiative, completed in less than six months, provided the retailer with a new e-commerce engine, along with guided search and recommendation solutions, all before the 2012 holiday shopping season kicked off."

"To extend its "commerce anywhere" strategy, Stage Stores has implemented Oracle Commerce. The initiative, completed in less than six months, provided the retailer with a new e-commerce engine, along with guided search and recommendation solutions, all before the 2012 holiday shopping season kicked off."

Returns are a fact of retailing and merchants have to be ready to deal with them. For instance, Stage's Oracle Corp. merchandising system allows the retailer to route online returns to either a distribution center if an item is still in season and salable or, if it isn't, to one of four clearance centers the chain maintains. During the holiday season, Hunter sets up special arrangements with makers of traditional holiday gifts, such as heated ice scrapers and other small items that might be featured in a Black Friday display, to have those products returned directly to the manufacturers or to have them shipped back in bulk from the stores' returned goods center in Jacksonville, Texas. Some vendors also agree to take back unsold products.

Hosting a cross-industry event like this one isn't easy and Oracle nailed it. A galvanizing topic was the overarching inter-industry trend that no one could have predicted just ten years ago; the "consumerization" of customer-centric industries like telecom, healthcare, and utilities. During a Customer Experience general session panel moderated at the conference by Oracle Retail SVP and GM Mike Webster, I found myself reflecting on the fact that Chris Hall CIO at prepaid mobile leader 2degrees, Penni McLean-Conner, Chief Customer Officer and SVP at Northeast Utilities, Gwen O'Keefe, VP of Analytics and Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Group Health Cooperative were all taking cues from Stage Stores CIO Steven Hunter, subject of our March feature story.

Today, e-commerce - now based on a new software platform from Oracle Commerce - accounts for about 2 percent of the company's sales and is growing at about 40 percent per year. Stage Stores expects it to reach 5 percent to 7 percent of sales - equivalent to its competitors - in the near future. E-commerce also enables the company's Send program, based on NCR Retail Endless Aisle technology, which allows customers to have merchandise shipped directly to their homes from another store or distribution center if their size or color is not available in the store they are visiting.