Oracle bolsters Retail Cloud with new services

Six new Oracle Retail cloud services, specifically, are now available by subscription, with the goal of helping retailers manage e-commerce, customer engagement, order management, order fulfillment, loss prevention and brand compliance.

Oracle's new Retail Brand Compliance Management cloud service, for instance, automates many of the operations required to grow and improve private-label merchandising operations. Retailers can use it to plan, track and manage merchandising activities, drop shipping and supplier relationships.

The company's new Retail Customer Engagement service, meanwhile, is designed to offer a segmented view of customers along with gift-registry capabilities and tools for managing loyalty programs and campaigns.

The new Oracle Retail Open Commerce Platform provides e-commerce features such as search-engine optimization, site search and personalization capabilities. It also enables sales and marketing staff to easily build and modify pages, launch or fine-tune promotions, and create user communities around shared interests, Oracle said.

Then there's Oracle's new Retail Order Broker cloud service, which is designed to give businesses real-time insight into available inventory across all retail channels and distribution centers from any point of service. One result is that store associates and call-center representatives can use the application to "save the sale" by quickly finding items in other locations, the company said.

Aiming to give online shoppers and call-center agents real-time visibility into ordering and fulfillment, meanwhile, is Oracle's new Retail Order Management System. One benefit of this new cloud service is that such users can verify inventory availability before an order is completed and form accurate expectations for delivery, Oracle said.

Last but not least, Oracle's new XBRi service is designed to equip retailers with tools for detecting, investigating and reducing losses from fraud and noncompliance. Loss-prevention investigators can use the service to pinpoint the location, register or individual behind suspicious activity. The technology also correlates transaction data with other loss-prevention methods to save research efforts and travel costs while determining whether an issue requires disciplinary or legal action.