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As online cosmetic shopping booms, leading beauty superstore ULTA Beauty has responded with an enhanced online experience that helps customers...

By replacing a third-party search service with Oracle Commerce's integrated search and navigation, Ultra dramatically improved site navigation and search results. The updated site lets consumers easily browse categories and find specific products among the retailer's more than 20,000 items in cosmetics, fragrance, hair care, skincare, body and bath products, and salon styling tools.

As Oracle's OpenWorld user conference closes for another year, Computer Weekly reflects on the challenge retailers face in the age of big data

Most recently, Kohl's overhauled its core merchandising, inventory, and pricing operations with the launch of a new Oracle Retail Merchandise Operations Management solution, allowing the retailer to coordinate a unified system of record for inventory to better serve customers across channels, and to simplify its business user experience.

"Consumers require access to their favorite brands 24/7 via nearby stores, their desktop, or using a mobile device, and Kohl's is moving quickly to deliver that type of personalized and relevant commerce-anywhere experience. By implementing the Oracle Retail family of applications, Kohl's is establishing a foundation to drive ongoing growth," said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail.

Oracle Retail solutions have played a key role in Kohl's multi-step business transformation process. Over time, the retailer has implemented a series of technologies to empower team members to anticipate customer demand, identify new market opportunities, and roll out more relevant and effective products and promotions across all channels.

"Oracle Retail has provided our merchants with more visibility to make informed decisions with better data to optimize performance at the item and store level," said Janet Schalk, executive VP and CIO, Kohl's. "Equally important, the Oracle Retail implementation establishes a foundation for future growth and innovation."

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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.

Value-oriented specialty department store Kohl's is transforming many of its core retail operations to accommodate recent growth and ensure that both its store and online shopping experiences reflect the unique preferences of consumers, no matter where they live and shop.

"Big data is not big news in retail but we are having to solve problems around the velocity and the variety of data," said Webster. "How do we bring in social interactions and marketing interactions together, to give you a more unified view of the entire customer engagement. We are a mobile world, with 6 billion mobile subscribers."

Central to making each customer experience better, said Moure, is the company's recent migration to a new e-commerce platform from Oracle Commerce. The Oracle platform provides PureFormulas' marketing team with industry-leading tools to personalize the customer experience through a series of levels, from the awareness of getting a customer on to its site to adding returning customers to its loyalty program, and each step is based on insights gleaned from customer data.