Oracle Commerce
Is This Your Business?5.0
Author: Kalicia Bateman
Oracle Corporation is an American-based global technology company. They design and market hardware and software projects for businesses, including e-commerce products. As of 2011, measured by revenue, Oracle is the second-largest manufacturer of software. Oracle doesn't offer monthly pricing on their website. You have to contact a vendor to get pricing information. Oracle is aimed at enterprise-level businesses looking to add e-commerce to their existing websites. While responsive design is part of the Oracle commerce paradigm, a web developer will design your templates and website for your e-store.
Top Ranked Companies
The Good
- Scale and Performance
- Adaptive Personalization with Customers
- Search Engine Optimization and Reporting
- Multi-site Commerce
- Guided Websites For Your Customers
- White Papers with Results
Oracle matched many of the features that we were looking for in an e-commerce platform. However, not a lot of functionality was described on the Oracle website. We did see that there were many of the features described in a white paper on the website and we saw numbers that showed that Oracle worked for the businesses that used it.
Scale and Performance
With Oracle, we found that it was very easy to go global with dynamic experiences on a very large scale. There is the flexibility, within Oracle Commerce, to expand to multi-channel, multi-site, and multi-currency environments, letting you go truly global.
Adaptive Personalization with Customers
Before your Oracle site is up and running, it is possible to design customer interactions and dialogues for the ultimate personalized e-commerce experience. With Oracle, the personalization engine lets you target content and products to organizations, roles, and even customized customer segments. Each customer that uses your Oracle store will have a dynamic customer profile that updates in real time based upon new interactions.
Search Engine Optimization and Reporting
With Oracle, there are search engine tools built into your e-store that let you rank consistently on sites such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. With the SEO capabilities, you also get big access to big data. With Oracle Commerce, you are able to monitor and analyze customer behavior and get customized reports on key performance indicators and customer activities within your store.
Multi-Site Commerce
One of the things that we saw with other providers, such as X-Cart, was that you needed to get a different license if you had different business websites. Oracle lets you use their technology between different e-commerce sites. This is very important because it lets you use one customized platform for all your e-commerce.
Guided Websites For Your Customers
If you have an internal search mechanism on your e-store, there are ranking controls for keywords, a thesaurus to link different keywords, and keyword redirection. What does it mean for your customers? They can easily navigate your product catalog without needing to know the exact name of the product that they are looking for. This lets customers easily refine their search and explore information on your e-store.
White Papers with Results
Oracle doesn't give a lot of information in the product description of their commerce solution. However, we did find that businesses using Oracle did notice immediate results. One company that used Oracle's Commerce platform, based out of Brazil, saw a sixty percent increase in sales when they started using Oracle as an e-commerce platform. Overall, Oracle Commerce has proven itself as being:
- Versatile, with responsive design built into custom e-stores.
- Mobile, letting customers access your e-store with the latest mobile optimization.
- Expandable, letting businesses sell across different websites with one platform.
The Bad
- Pricing
- Large Business Focused
- Payment
Pricing
Oracle has a price list on their website, but it was hard to tell what applications we would need to purchase in order to fully roll out a new online store. We tried getting pricing information from their online chat portal and didn't get very far.
Large Business Focused
Another thing that we didn't like Oracle was that their solution didn't seem very scalable. Oracle is aimed towards large businesses, not the small startups that many of the e-stores in the industry are aimed at. We also couldn't see any themes on their website, but found that developers usually design a customer's e-store.
Payment
You can try many of Oracle's products online with a free 30-day trial period, but we couldn't find out how this trial applied to their commerce product. We also found that Oracle takes multiple payment methods, including PayPal and major credit cards, but the type of payment has to be deployed with some hefty backend programming by an Oracle developer. Overall, it seems like there is a very steep entry curve into Oracle. For small businesses, your team might not have the budget or developer to deploy Oracle Commerce.
