With each release of Orckestra Commerce Cloud, we evolve with new digital commerce capabilities that enable additional opportunities for our clients. These fresh opportunities sometimes come in the form of distinct experiences for their customers, and sometimes they come in the form of improved and better streamlined experiences and processes for their employees. This latest release is a blend of new platform advancements that make commerce management more efficient, that enable new order fulfillment use cases for your customers, and offer more informative reports and data extracts to support your decision makers. Here are some of the highlights from the release.
'Ship-to-store' order routing
Ship-to-store order fulfillment is challenging for any retailer, but it’s even more of a challenge when you can’t provide your employees and customers with the right experience and workflow to manage the process. In this release, we’re addressing these challenges based on experience and collaboration with retailers, so we can make omni-channel order fulfillment easier to implement successfully.
This new packaged ‘Ship-to-Store’ functionality enables you to easily fulfill an order by shipping stock from a warehouse or store to a pick-up location (which can also be another store closer to the customer). As a retailer, you’re able to expand your inventory reach beyond the limitations of your store, to the full inventory available via your distribution centers, while at the same time providing your customers the ease of collecting the order from a convenient location.
Complex price list management made easy
To stay competitive, retailers must be able to plan and execute on complex product pricing strategies where values evolve over time, transitioning between regular prices, sales prices and clearance prices. In addition, global retailers need to be able to manage multiple price lists across different brands, geographies, stores, franchisees, etc. With this release, our pricing management capabilities expand with an intuitive user experience to effortlessly manage and prioritize your organization’s time-based price lists. Managing overlapping price lists and setting priorities for your global retail business is a breeze with a simple but effective drag-and-drop mechanism.
Improved customer account security
The safekeeping of customer information is paramount, and we’ve put additional security measures in place to prevent malicious attacks on your customers’ private information. These enhancements include a configurable timeframe during which a password reset request must be completed, an increasing delay between subsequent login attempts, an account lock after a specified amount of login attempts, and a filter for a CSR to easily retrieve locked accounts.
Bulk add or modify product information from Excel
Every business is unique and operates differently. The administration and management of your product catalog is no exception. You need the tools to support your business with the right balance of flexibility and guidance all the while maintaining a high level of integrity of your product data.
Product contributors are now able to add new products or modify key product information in a quick and efficient manner using Excel. Products with and without variants and those across families with varying specification attributes can be added or modified from a spreadsheet that is easy to read and manipulate with the right validation to govern. This new interface to your product catalog can be used to complement and elevate your current processes throughout the lifecycle of your catalog’s products.
New reports
We’re empowering your business with even more data to analyze and make key decisions on. We’ve added new standard reports to the Analytics application that will provide your decision makers more insight on orders, pricing, inventory and product lifecycle.
These reports give you the flexibility to filter the scope of data by meaningful parameters, and have been formatted in such a way to easily manipulate the data in Excel and help surface valuable trends.
Greater tax flexibility
Last release, we introduced the certified integration with the Avalara solution for tax management and compliance. This solution gives our customers the capabilities they need to confidently calculate and collect sales taxes with each transaction.This time around, we’ve taken our tax support even further to be able to define a tax category at the variant level. This enhancement will, for example, enable retailers to apply different tax categories for children’s sizes versus adult sizes. The engine will take the selected variant into consideration when calculating the sales taxes for each line item.
Find customer orders quicker
With the right tools, customer service representatives (CSR) can be equipped to deliver exceptional support to your customers. The sooner your CSR’s can retrieve pertinent information, the sooner they can take action resulting in happy (and hopefully repeat) customers. We’ve provided CSR’s with a few more tricks to help find customer orders that much quicker. Customer service representatives can now use the advanced filters to find orders not only by key customer information but also by key shipping and billing address information.
Marketing beta has even more features
For those of you that are reviewing the Marketing Beta, since our last sneak peek of the Marketing application, we’ve been adding more and more functionality to further increase the efficiency of managing many complex promotions.
From the Beta application, you’re now able to manage cart promotions with even more flexibility and options than before as well as campaign management and execution. Keep an eye out for the full launch of the new Marketing application in an upcoming release this summer. I also invite you to read about the added capabilities from our previous release, including experience management for commerce.
As always, our goal is to help you elevate your business with new capabilities and omni-channel shopping experiences. We hope you’ll enjoy these new features and we’re looking forward to hearing from you if you have any feedback.
Shammeera.
