Cloud innovations in the Oracle retail platform make it easier for retailers to manage pricing and promotion strategies that move inventory while building customer loyalty
Inflation and marketing offer overload are making it harder for retailers to engage increasingly fickle customers with a price point and message that gets them to act. To address these challenges, Oracle today announced a series of new cloud capabilities. Price Hub extends Oracle Retail Merchandising Cloud Services to automate the pricing process so retailers can easily make purchase price updates across thousands of products to maximize sales and margins. And new promotion capabilities in Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Services help retailers drive incremental revenue and profitability by executing more personalized and compelling offers. The cloud services are running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
“Consumers are bombarded with a barrage of offers and messages every day, and well-executed promotions and great prices are what most often get them to pay attention and take action,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Retail. “By extending our comprehensive platform for modern retail we are eliminating the hassle in executing effective pricing and promotion programs, while helping retailers support their broader financial, merchandising, and customer engagement goals.”
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The price is right
In a recent survey* of more than 8,000 global consumers, 47% noted that price is the leading factor in getting them to make a purchase. As such, retailers need the flexibility to quickly adjust prices based on market forces and consumer demand. However, with thousands of products distributed across multiple geographies, manually managing pricing changes is often laborious and inaccurate. Price Hub automates price movements and calculates the best price based on the retailer’s specific pricing strategy. Price Hub modules include:
- Price Strategies allows retailers to automate price changes based on their configured strategies using pre-defined fields such as cost, margin, area differential, or competitor. They can also build in their own unique fields as required.
- Price Modeling enables retailers to model prices based on cost, margin, or a ‘what-if’ analysis prior to making pricing updates to mitigate risk.
- Event Planning helps retailers create and manage a significant number of promotions and/or clearances. This includes supporting collaboration between teams in developing promotions and managing budget data and marketing materials.
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Promotions that pay off
Second to price, the survey* showed that a special offer is what most often moves a consumer (39%) from a browser to a buyer. And 30% added that compelling offers are what attracts them to buy from new brands. Yet clearly defining and fulfilling these offers across channels is often a time-consuming headache for retailers. New extensions to Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Services eliminates these challenges to help retailers drive incremental revenue and profitability by more executing relevant offers. New modules include:
- Oracle Retail Promotion Engine Cloud Service is a highly scalable promotion management solution. Its calculation engine has built-in APIs that make it easy to integrate with a retailers’ existing transaction systems such as Point of Sale (POS), ecommerce, order management, and other shopping apps. It provides a unique ‘single point of definition’ for each promotion so retailers can publish a wide variety of offers at the same time without system confusion. This helps ensure that consumers receive a consistent purchase experience regardless of channel.
- Campaign and Deal Management Cloud Service can seamlessly publish offers into the Oracle Retail Promotion Engine to extend promotion capabilities to include single and multi-use coupons. Built-in performance scorecards provide key performance metrics on how each promotion is performing.
- Oracle Retail Customer Management and Segmentation Foundation Cloud Service securely stores customer data so that retailers can define and focus on high potential customer segments that can increase loyalty, average spend, and repeat purchases. The campaign and deal management module uses this information to get the right offers to the right customers at the right time to improve satisfaction and marketing ROI.