Improving your Business with an Oracle SaaS eCommerce Solution

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WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW About Oracle

What is an Oracle Solution?

Oracle is offering Solutions, which are as the word implies, ways to solve business-related problems. With options covering business analytics, the cloud, customer experience and relationship management, data science, enterprise management, enterprise resource planning, software and platform as services, and applicability to every sector under the sun, Oracle’s Solutions can offer a helping hand to any asking company.

Regardless of the size of the business, or its focus, Oracle can offer ways to elevate a business’s innovation, modernity, and competitiveness in a digital world. From Cloud Solutions, to specific Industry Solutions, and Emerging Solutions, Oracle can cover all foreseeable needs of a company which wants to have a digital infrastructure, integrated architecture and the ability to interpret successfully customer signals.

How Can Your eCommerce Platform Be Benefited by an Oracle Solution?

How Can an Oracle Solution Benefit Your eCommerce Platform?

At this point it is assumed that you have an eCommerce platform, where you engage in B2B or B2C commerce, and you want to take the next step towards ensuring a seamless and personalized shopping experience for your customers, surpassing their expectations. Improving your eCommerce platform by integrating with an Oracle Solution can help towards achieving this goal. There are four main points of interest when thinking about integration and how it can help your business. Synchronization, data accuracy, business workflow efficiency, and customer empowerment.

Synchronization

Imagine if the synchronization between pressing the “start” and “stop” function of a laser gun was off by an undefined number of seconds. What would that mean for eye laser therapy? Maybe not to that extend, but synchronization between the front and the back-end of a business is very important, and can also affect the eCommerce platform (usually regarded as the front-end, or storefront of a business). The ability to offer a personalized customer experience based on accurate data is a key factor for customer satisfaction, hence company success, and it only becomes more difficult as the size or eCommerce output of a business expands. Having integrated the Oracle Solutions used in the back-end, with the eCommerce platform(s) can lead to synchronization and adequate management of what is available to which customers at any point, though the same or different portals.

Data Accuracy

Similarly to synchronization, data accuracy is very important for business, as data influence decision making from the side of the business stakeholders, but also data available to customers can influence their decisions on whether they will proceed to a transaction or not. Hence, making sure that data used at any point are accurate, is of paramount importance. Integrating the eCommerce platform with the Oracle applications used in the back-end can provide the “real-time” element of data accuracy related to various functions, such as orders, customer database, inventory, customer feedback, or product analytics. Using an analogy to highlight how an integration can enhance the data accuracy, we could say that it would be like a business can have customers back in the inventory, knowing exactly what they came to buy, and calling them by their name.

Business Workflow Efficiency

Achieving workflow efficiency is the key target of every business. When a business has several departments, offering several products in several countries, engaging with B2B and B2C commerce, workflow can be overwhelming, especially if the function of these stakeholders depends on information shared between them, or used to influence decisions. A way to improve workflow efficiency is to integrate the flow of information, which can be achieved through the integration of the eCommerce platform with the Oracle solutions used internally by a business.

Customer Empowerment

What all customers want is to feel valued. Feel that they have the power to proceed or not with a certain transaction, they are being provided with all the information, the ultimate choice is theirs and they out their convenience first. The integration of an Oracle Solution being used in the back end of the business, with the eCommerce storefront being used by the customer can help with that. Through integration, an eCommerce platform can provide extra information, allowing the customer to select from a plethora of services, compare prices, build their own product, select shipping dates, even offer real-time data on what other customers might be looking at. These actions enhance the decision-making process and increase customer satisfaction. It can be argued that successful integration can lead to more opportunities-to-quote, quotes-to-orders and service-to-sales.

INTEGRATING AN ORACLE SOLUTION: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Integrating an Oracle Solution to Your eCommerce Platform

If someone asked 20 or 30 years ago about how integration can be done within a business, employees would sigh on the thought of manually handling data files, trying to make sure that everything is up to date and every department has the correct information, with this process lasting potentially for months. In today’s globalized business horizon where businesses are based, organized and run using SaaS and PaaS applications, integration is ever so important for a company to stay afloat, but simultaneously, it does not have to be a lengthy, difficult process. A business might use several different Oracle SaaS applications, ERP software, or other solutions, which should seamlessly integrate with its eCommerce platforms, in order to offer customer satisfaction, and subsequently, increased performance, traffic and profits.

Why is Integration Important?

We have already mentioned that integration can offer synchronization and customer empowerment, but integration between the back-end and the storefront of a business is also important in order to:

  • Enter an era of automation: why have to manually transfer information of you can have your applications do it for you in a secure, fast, and reliable way, without human intervention requirements?
  • No need to say things twice: in an integrated system which uses information from various ends, transfers information and being constantly updated, there is no need to enter the same information through different portals, or directed to different receivers. Supplying the information once will be enough to update any relevant entry.
  • Be faster and better: in line with keeping things up-to-date, having integrated the eCommerce platform with the back-end Oracle solutions used can improve business performance.

Potential Issues you Might Encounter During Integration and How to Avoid them.

Although integrating Oracle Solutions to your eCommerce platform can be very useful, there are a few areas of concern with regards to such an integration.

  • Data governance: metadata management is key for data governance, as it ensures business and IT accountability for data passing through the system, data transparency, and can help identify areas of improvement regarding processes and performance. Choosing a suitable metadata technology is key to avoid issues around data governance.
  • Data security: sensitive data leak is the nightmare of every data-handling business. Back and front-end integration needs to be done is such a way, so that only certain data can be used in real time and viewed by customers as part of their personalized experience, ensuring protection from unintended data breaches.