IBM Software Cross-industry

IBM Commerce on Cloud Deliver a seamless and consistent buying experience with cross-channel commerce in the cloud

Keep pace with a rapidly changing e-commerce landscape and create a more personalized and engaging buying experience for your customers with IBM® Commerce on Cloud. As a leader in cloud computing and cross-channel commerce, IBM can help you transform the customer expe-rience, grow revenue and extend the reach of your brand. Whether your company has an established e-commerce presence or you are seek-ing to create a new presence, IBM and the cloud can help.

Commerce services and solutions from IBM can help organizations address the growing complexities across the e-commerce lifecycle. From the creation of an e-commerce strategy to design, deployment and ongo-ing business operations management, IBM and IBM Commerce on Cloud can help companies jump-start, grow or upgrade their e-commerce capa-bilities. IBM Commerce on Cloud brings together best-in-class e-com-merce, order management, pricing, quoting and configuration capabilities as well as web analytics to create an extended commerce platform. To help accelerate time to market and minimize up-front investments, IBM pro-vides prebuilt store templates and out-of-the-box integrations to third-party systems. Along with powerful business user tools for quick and easy site management, IBM offers the flexibility to move between cloud and on-premises deployment models as business needs change.

Highlights• Maximizesonlinerevenuepotential

• Improvestransparencywithreal-timeinven-toryavailability

• Speedstimetomarketwithconfigurablestoretemplates

• Empowersbusinessuserswithprecisionmarketingtools

• ExtendscommercesolutionswithprebuiltintegrationtoIBMandthird-partypartysystems,suchasIBMPaymentSystemsandIBMCoremetrics

• DeliverssecurityandreliabilitythroughIBMSoftLayerinfrastructure

• Providesacomprehensiveplatformforgrowthwiththeabilitytotransitionbetweencloudandon-premisessolutions

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Maximizing your online potentialIBM Commerce on Cloud opens up opportunities for compa-nies of virtually all sizes to improve online revenue by quickly setting up and maintaining an online storefront. Emerging companies or companies with established e-commerce capa-bilities can now quickly and cost-competitively test new mar-ket segments, launch new brands or launch their online presence while delivering a seamless, comprehensive customer experience similar to that provided by the largest brands in the world.

With best-in-class e-commerce capabilities, companies can manage the customer experience from marketing and selling through fulfillment and postorder management. IBM Com-merce on Cloud offers an integrated commerce platform developed using the IBM Smarter Commerce™ approach, including e-commerce, promotions, inventory visibility, order management and integrates with payments, tax, e-mail mar-keting and analytics systems designed to transform the global go-to-market strategies for B2C, B2B and B2B2C companies.

IBM Commerce on Cloud

IBM SoftLayer

IBM Services

Create seamless, engaging and contextually relevant digital brand experiences

Strategy Design Deployment BusinessOperations

Enable flexible fulfillment and orchestrate orders across channels

Select, configure, quote, and order complex products and services

Figure 1:IBMCommerceonCloudisdesignedtomakeiteasytoengagecustomerswithrich,personalizedonlineexperiences.

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Delivering real-time inventory availabilityIBM Commerce on Cloud enables your company to deliver a superior experience to online shoppers by providing a seamless, comprehensive cross-channel and highly personalized buying experience, from opportunity through order fulfillment, with integrated order management capabilities.

Delight customers with the order promise through a combi-nation of inventory visibility and sourcing capabilities. Rules-based order promising and scheduling are designed to enable inventory to be appropriately allocated based on distribution nodes and regions to best meet order conditions. A real-time view of supply and available-to-promise inventory enhances the customer buying experience, which can result in a lower cart abandonment rate and increased revenue.

Of executives surveyed, 50 percent say they are investing in software as a service to increase customer-driven innovation.1

Commerce on Cloud also helps your organization provide supe-rior postorder customer care with online self-service tools and by enabling call center representatives to more effectively ser-vice customers. Customers can opt to receive order confirma-tion and shipment email notifications, while an alert console allows call center agents to find out about payment, settlement and back-order situations that require customer outreach. With integrated order management capabilities, IBM helps you sim-plify the administration and maintenance of customer orders and deliver a personalized experience for your customers.

Enabling security-rich payment processingIBM Commerce on Cloud completes the order-to-cash cycle with with an optional security-rich gateway to accept pay-ments globally, help prevent data theft and facilitate compli-ance with the critical industry standards of the Payment Card Industry (PCI). Settlement transactions can be automatically triggered as a result of a shipment or other order update. Optional integration with the Avalara AvaTax service helps ensure that taxes are accurately calculated and recorded as part of the payment process.

Accelerating time to market with store templatesBuilding your web store with IBM Commerce on Cloud is designed to be easy, with configurable store templates that are the result of best practices accrued over years of IBM experi-ence serving some of the biggest brands in the world. They take advantage of Commerce on Cloud capabilities and optional integrations with web analytics, order management, payments, tax calculation, social capabilities, and bulk email delivery sys-tems and services.

Based on your requirements, IBM will create a high-functioning, feature-rich store for you that can provide features such as:

• Advanced search engine optimization• Catalog browsing• Product comparisons• Product information pop-ups• Multiangle product images• Shopping cart• Inventory status• Order history and status• Store locator• Coupon wallet and wish lists

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Your product catalog data will be loaded into the store, and indi-vidual page templates will be customized with your logo, brand messaging, marketing messages and content. You can also add your own custom content pages, such as an “about us” page or a search landing page, to the store when you need to.

With IBM Commerce on Cloud store templates, you’ll have the features, models and best practices necessary for a direct-to-consumer online store while reducing customization costs and time to market for your new web store. Also provide busi-ness users the ability to quickly create and customize the con-tent of your store pages without involving IT.

Empowering business users IBM Management Center for Commerce on Cloud software is a web-based application that empowers business users to man-age practically all facets of your online store. Intuitive, easy-to-use tools deliver a personalized buying experience and help

maximize revenue by managing catalogs and content, creating promotions, and delivering personalized marketing campaigns.

With Management Center for Commerce on Cloud, your orga-nization can quickly and easily:

• ManageyouronlinestorewithoutITinvolvement—With the Workspace Management tool, you can schedule and publish changes to your online store and track the prog-ress of those changes to help ensure that they go through the required checkpoints before being published. Store changes can be previewed before they’re submitted and published on a nightly basis. In the case of an emergency, changes can be published through a quick publish process.

• Optimizeandenrichcatalogcontent—The Catalogs tool allows you to manage master and sales catalogs and establish relationships between products to facilitate cross-sell and up-sell and drive new and enhanced revenue. Additionally, you can enable shoppers to quickly and easily find the products they’re looking for by fine-tuning site search and managing search engine optimization through product attributes.

• Increasesalesandrevenuewithpromotions—Maximize online sales and revenue with the ability to create and man-age promotions that support marketing campaigns for your site. Promotions can be created based on many predefined promotion types, including order promotions, shipping pro-motions, catalog and product category promotions, and mul-tiple item promotions.

• Enableprecisionmarketing—Optimize sales revenue and profitability with an array of tools to create, manage and deploy personalized marketing campaigns to shoppers. The precision marketing engine can be configured to sense trig-ger events such as an abandoned cart, order placement, social media participation, and search term or referring URL. You can then target customers with offers such as custom landing pages or targeted product cross-sells and up-sells.

• Manageassets—The asset management tool provides a means for business users to upload and manage all types of content, such as product images, marketing ads and other files, to support store pages, marketing campaigns and promotions.

Figure 2:IBMCommerceonCloudisdesignedtomakeiteasytoengagecustomerswithrich,personalizedonlineexperiences.

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Extending e-commerce through IBM and third-party extensionsIBM Commerce on Cloud helps make it easy to extend your e-commerce capabilities and launch a comprehensive, online store in a shortened deployment time with minimal up-front investment. With optional integrations to web analytics, sales tax calculation and ratings, and review services, you have access to enterprise capabilities and functionality used by some of the world’s largest online retailers.

• Webanalytics—You can choose to integrate your web store with IBM Coremetrics® web analytics to provide your market-ers with insights about your online customers and how they’re interacting with your brand. Coremetrics software allows you to deliver personalized product recommendations and view analytics reports designed specifically for Commerce on Cloud that display business reports, site metrics and site performance. With IBM’s industry-leading web analytics solution, you can leverage analytics tags that are available on web store pages, which enables you to react in real time to how customers are interacting with your site.

• Salestaxcalculation—IBM provides the ability to calculate sales tax at the time payment is accepted. By integrating with a third party cloud-based intelligent tax calculation ser-vice, IBM Commerce on Cloud can automate the sales tax calculation process and make it easier for you to support reg-ulatory compliance. The service can streamline complex, error-prone tax compliance processes and reduce the risk of loss or penalty in case of an audit.

• Ratingsandreviews—The ability to include customer rat-ings and reviews with your website requires a subscription to an optional cloud-based solution provided by Bazaarvoice soft-ware. Bazaarvoice allows clients to leverage the voice of the customer by creating online social communities that encour-age authentic conversations about your brand. IBM also pro-vides the tools that allow you to translate this user-generated content into actionable insights that drive improvements in marketing, sales, customer service and product development.

• Maximizesiteperformance—To maximize storefront per-formance and help deliver a quality buying experience for your customers, IBM Commerce on Cloud integrates with a third party web acceleration solution to maintain high levels of per-formance, scalability and availability across your site.

• Maximizemarketingeffectivenesswithemailcam-paigns—IBM Commerce on Cloud integrates with a third party e-mail marketing solution to help marketers deliver tar-geted marketing messages to customers through email deliv-ery. This enables companies to maximize the relevance and precision of their email communications while maintaining a positive sender reputation and helping ensure that messages are delivered to the inbox, every time.

Figure 3:TheIBMCoremetricsWebAnalyticsdashboardprovidesinsightataglance.

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Delivering enhanced security and reliabilityWith Commerce on Cloud, IBM can help you speed time to market and reduce risk with a single source of ownership and accountability for your e-commerce operating environment. IBM Commerce on Cloud leverages the SoftLayer infrastruc-ture, delivering robust security and reliability for your e-com-merce platform and customer data.

IBM employs a two-pronged security strategy to protect cus-tomer data that comprises perimeter security practices and appli-cation level security driven by IBM data security requirements that help ensure that security controls, system patching, mon-itoring and alerting are uniformly implemented and maintained for service offerings. These practices cover disaster recovery, regulatory compliance, operational risk assessment and audit-ing procedures. Regular penetration testing and ethical hack-ing tests are also performed.

Teaming for growthIBM offers a range of deployment options and business models for e-commerce solutions to address the diverse needs of compa-nies of varying sizes across industries with the ability to migrate between cloud and on-premises deployment approaches. As business needs change, companies that deploy their web stores with IBM Commerce on Cloud can migrate to a licensed, on-premises solution or translate cloud subscription entitlements to a perpetual model.

E-commerce solutions from IBM power some of the largest websites in the world and transact more of the top 500 online retailers’ revenue than any other third-party e-commerce solu-tion provider.2 With IBM, you’re selecting a trusted e-commerce vendor that can support your business as it grows and business needs change.

Consulting and software services from IBM help you get the most from your IBM Commerce on Cloud deployment with world-class consulting, training and technical support. Our e-commerce experts help clients use their IBM Commerce on Cloud software to successfully and profitably market and sell products and services. Whether you need to design and deploy a new e-commerce strategy or enhance the one you already have, IBM can deliver a scalable e-commerce solution and help you manage and maintain that solution while reducing overall cost, time to value and risk.

You can leverage the deep technical skills of our lab-based soft-ware services team and the business consulting, project man-agement and infrastructure expertise of our IBM Global Services team to provide the global reach, intellectual capital, industry insight and technology leadership to support a wide range of critical business needs. Design services from IBM Interactive combine this technical expertise with significant creative tal-ent to deliver a user experience that can separate you from the competition. With the ability to develop digital brand and mar-keting strategy; design, create and implement online customer experiences; and create and manage campaigns, IBM helps cli-ents create brand differentiation, enhance business value and improve key customer interactions.

IBM Global Process Services augments IBM’s software and IBM Global Business Services® offerings with comprehensive busi-ness, process and IT managed services. These can help busi-ness executives deploy and manage cross-channel commerce processes by providing outsourced human capital to staff busi-ness operations, including call center, customer support, ana-lytics and web content management teams. IBM Global Process Services can help organizations maximize the effectiveness of their investments and augment internal skills with e-commerce optimization and management services.

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Why IBM?E-commerce is no longer simply about establishing and main-taining an online presence. Businesses need to differentiate themselves from their competition and provide an exceptional customer experience to engage, transact, fulfill and service cus-tomers to grow revenue through the online channel.

To tackle the challenges of e-commerce, organizations require an ally that can help them gain insight from their online custom-ers and adapt quickly to changing customer dynamics. IBM provides a robust e-commerce solution that spans the online sales lifecycle—from order capture to order fulfillment—and includes leading software and services from a single vendor. IBM can be your strategic resource for designing, implement-ing, managing, optimizing and hosting an online strategy and presence. With the IBM SoftLayer infrastructure, you can gain a security-rich, reliable environment that is backed by a trusted industry leader with a successful track record of deploy-ing high-value commerce solutions across industries.

For more informationTo learn more about IBM Commerce on Cloud, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/commerceoncloud

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1 Forrester Research, Inc., SaaS Drives Competitive Advantage By Enabling Speed, Flexibility, And Innovation, January 2013.

2 Based on online revenue of IBM clients listed in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, 2012 edition.

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