NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N) today announced that it has acquired Retail Anywhere, a leading provider of multi-channel retail management solutions designed to improve the retail customer experience.
The acquisition builds on NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce platform, delivering the industry’s first and only integrated cloud business suite for retailers, giving them what they need to grow revenues, open up new sales channels and expand their business globally. It fulfills a strong demand among retailers for a single commerce solution that supports the multiple customer touchpoints a retail business needs to succeed – from physical points of sale (POS) at brick-and-mortar stores or other locations to call centers, social media and B2B, B2C, and eCommerce via desktops, laptops, iPhone/iPad, and other smartphones and tablets. The acquisition brings thousands of customers using the Retail Anywhere POS system to NetSuite as well as more than 28 years of deep retail vertical expertise, knowledge in retail operations and best practices in building rock-solid retail management solutions.
This unified commerce platform allows retailers to significantly enhance the commerce experiences with capabilities like “shop-online, pickup in store” and “save the sale” to fulfill in-store customer needs from any inventory location, including eCommerce. For more information, please visit www.netsuite.com/retail.
“Up to now traditional retailing has been left behind as the rest of the world has embraced cloud technology,” said Andy Lloyd, General Manager of Commerce, NetSuite. “With this acquisition, even brick-and-mortar retailers are able to become part of the rapidly evolving global commerce cloud. By adding an in-store solution to SuiteCommerce, NetSuite is enabling merchants to meet their customers’ demands for cross-channel shopping integration. NetSuite Retail Anywhere further extends the reach of NetSuite’s full platform of business capabilities to the showroom floor, where most retail business still takes place today.”
A NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Network (SDN) partner, Retail Anywhere created the popular Retail Anywhere POS SuiteApp for NetSuite. The solution runs on traditional POS hardware as well as Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch mobile devices to simply and securely conduct transactions from anywhere. The Retail Anywhere team brings its retail industry expertise and proven management acumen to NetSuite’s eTail/Retail Products business unit. Retail Anywhere CEO Branden Jenkins, a longtime retail industry veteran with deep expertise in retail operations and retail software development, joins NetSuite as General Manager, eTail/Retail Products.
“In a retail industry where most widely-deployed POS solutions were developed before the web browser existed, there is a tremendous market opportunity for solutions that enable retail operations for the mobile, consumer environment,” Jenkins said. “We are excited to join NetSuite, given the company’s cloud-based, Commerce as a Service approach to enabling multi-channel retail, the unique business value that the extended NetSuite platform brings to each retailer-customer relationship, and a proven industry track record of success with retail customers and partners.”
According to the Deloitte 2012 Annual Holiday Survey, consumers who engage with retailers through multiple customer touchpoints were likely to spend 71 percent more than those who only engage through the traditional brick-and-mortar channel. The report’s findings further suggest that this cross-channel consumer base is growing and that businesses can enjoy significant competitive advantages if they develop sophisticated, multi-channel retail capabilities that personalize the customer experience and bring more value to each retail interaction. Unfortunately, legacy retail systems lack the technical capacity to unify multiple channels, and retailers have to use multiple, disparate software systems to run their businesses, creating inefficiency and customer frustration.
NetSuite’s Acquisition of Retail Anywhere Adds Key Capabilities to the SuiteCommerce Platform to Allow Retailers to Grow Revenues and Expand GloballyUnique in the industry, NetSuite SuiteCommerce combines a state-of-the-art web storefront with the core NetSuite business suite for a complete, customer-centric cloud commerce solution. SuiteCommerce enables retailers and other merchants to manage key B2C and B2B transactions across multiple touchpoints, including POS, websites, smartphones, tablets and call centers without the limitations and complexity of legacy commerce systems, including the inability of in-store, eCommerce point-solutions and legacy back-end systems to easily integrate and cost-effectively scale. Such systems often limit visibility into customer lifetime value by producing a fragmented view of customers, inventory and financials. As a result, organizations lack visibility into their operations and customers, making it difficult to satisfy customer needs, streamline operations and contain costs. Additionally, SuiteCommerce lets retailers seeking to expand abroad manage growth, with capabilities for multiple languages, sites, companies, currencies and tax compliance.
SuiteCommerce’s integrated business processes, delivered via easy-to-use systems, provide insight into customers and inventory across multiple touchpoints and locations, giving modern retailers the ability to not only meet customer expectations, but exceed them.
Now, with the addition of NetSuite Retail Anywhere, retailers have new capabilities to capture and take advantage of transactional and customer data within the NetSuite SuiteCommerce platform and the core NetSuite ERP / financials and CRM solution. Retailers can now leverage the following powerful capabilities to run their end-to-end multi-channel retail business:
*Enhanced in-store experience. By unifying the online and in-store customer experience, NetSuite Retail Anywhere enhances customer visibility by leveraging data from across a business to provide the insight necessary for delivering personalized service, building customer loyalty and increasing revenue.
Supporting, enabling the latest POS technology. NetSuite Retail Anywhere supports the latest POS hardware and mobility devices, guaranteeing that retailers have reliable, proven in-store solutions.
*Extending sales and service with mobile POS. The solution incorporates the power and functionality of a traditional retail POS workstation in a mobile device to service customers anywhere. From the easy-to-use mobile device, sales associates can conduct sales transactions, secure payments, print customer receipts, review customer information, perform item look-ups from the sales floor, determine product quantity on hand and locate out-of-stock items in order to “save the sale” on the showroom floor.
*360-degree customer view. Provides a single view of customer orders, preferences, issues, and contact and payment information to ensure retailers can deliver rewarding interactions in a store, online, on the phone or anywhere else.
Real-time visibility and analytics. Retailers gain on-demand insights into such critical metrics as same-store sales, average ticket price, average items per ticket, and sales per square foot, helping to drive merchandising, price optimization and marketing promotions.
*Real-time inventory management. Retailers can view and adjust to inventory fluctuations on the fly across all channels, minimizing costly stock-outs and overstock while enabling customers to view both in-store and online product availability over the web.
*Dynamic web storefront. The SuiteCommerce webstore helps customers easily find the product they want, strategically recommends products to drive sales, offers streamlined checkout and adapts on the fly to the customer’s device of choice (e.g., smartphone, laptop, tablet, etc.).
*Order management. Ensures quick and efficient processing of all orders through a flexible order processing workflow, provides the ability to set approval rules, and automatically selects delivery from specific warehouses based on inventory availability and geographic proximity, regardless of whether an order comes from in-store, by phone or via the website.
*Customer support. Provides customer support capabilities such as case workflow management, order monitoring (status of an order, etc.) and robust customer self-service capabilities for common queries and changes.
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