NetSuite has expanded its business management presence to the retail arena with the acquisition of Retail Anywhere—a move that will give NetSuite channel partners access to sell a cloud business suite for retailers.
The commerce solution that supports the multiple customer touch points, including physical points of sale (POS) at brick-and-mortar stores or other locations, to call centers, social media, e-commerce and m-commerce. The unified commerce platform also supports hybrid shopping, like a “order online, pickup in store” functionality and “save the sale” to fulfill in-store customer needs from any inventory location.
Channel partners can capture a big opportunity with a cloud offering for the vertical. According to the Deloitte 2012 Annual Holiday Survey, consumers who engage with retailers through multiple customer touch points 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. That opens the doors to retail-focused channel partners to offer customers a new approach.
“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 at 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.”
The Retail Anywhere POS SuiteApp for NetSuite runs on traditional PoS hardware as well as Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod touch mobile devices to simply and securely conduct transactions from anywhere.
“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,” said Retail Anywhere CEO Branden Jenkins. “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.”
