As online shopping gets more popular, brick and mortar retailers are fighting back with Omnichannel solutions to survive in this marketplace. See how SAP’s Hybris helped Apparel & Fashion retailer Monsoon Accessorize and Lorna Jane integrate online and physical store shopping…
Retail – Changing Trends and Disruptions Worldwide
A recent study by BCG (Boston Consultancy Group) and Facebook reveals that by 2020, 33 percent of urban customers will buy online in India. This change would account for $12-14bn from an estimated market of $70bn.
Another article published in usatoday.com says, major retailers – Macy’s, Sears, J.C.Penney and others are closing more than 500 retail stores in 2017. The closures will result in savings of more than $200mn per year.
The Omni-channel Approach
Omni-channel is a multichannel approach to sales that seeks to provide the customer with a seamless shopping experience whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a bricks and mortar store.
The omni-channel solution is scalable and built on a modern and flexible architecture, that allows interaction with all interfaces. Its order management solution, inventory and commerce application are built to work together seamless and easily connect with other systems.
Stuart O’Neill – Sales Director, ANZ, SAP Hybris explains omni-channel
The Hybris Solution
- Hybris comes with key digital trans-formative accelerators (template with the required tools to deliver best buying experience.)for commerce, marketing and C4C (Cloud for Customer) encompassing.
- Travel
- Automotive
- Industries
- Utilities etc.
- It can be integrated with SAP ERP or with SAP CRM when it comes to either managing customer engagement using Hybris Profile or managing marketing campaigns and promotions.
- It is compliant with social media to gather views, feeds and also social marketing.
- Predictive analytics can be performed with SAP-BW and Business Objects
- It is powered by SAP HANA
- Supports digital/mobile platforms – Android, Windows and IoS
- YaaS (Hybris as a service) is the micro services development platform provided with Hybris to build custom services and applications.
- It offers PCM (Product Content Management) and CMS (Content Management System) in Marketing, Sales, Revenue and Commerce. Additionally, it also provides a tool to manage customer engagement with CX (Customer Experience)
Competitive Landscape
A recent study by Forrester Wave in March’17 compares 11 & 13 major service providers in the B2B and B2C Commerce Solutions respectively over various criteria. The major evaluation criteria was based on the product strategy, vision, solution architecture, product capabilities, user experience management, customer touchpoints etc. The participants were selected based on the criteria – atleast $20M annual sales and 50 existing clients, has a global customer base etc.
# While Oracle Web Commerce (ATG) is preferred by small (<50 employees) to medium (51-1000) enterprises Hybris and Salesforce fits the bill for medium to large enterprises (>1000).
#Salesforce scores slightly above Hybris in –
- Returns/refunds in the end to end order process
- Product migration from testing to production environment
- Ease of use of the solution
Magento enjoys the leadership position in terms of market share (29%)^ in the E-Commerce space. It’s basically open source and devoid of any licencing issues unlike others. It is suitable for small enterprises but it has limited capabilities when it comes to handling B2B challenges. Also, its scalability and architecture are challenges considering it is open source.
While Demandware is SaaS cloud based solution and best suited for B2C retailers, Hybris is best suited for on-premise and also supports cloud option.
B2B (Business 2 Business)
Hybris along-with Intershop and Insite Software are leaders in B2B segment in terms of current offering and strategy. IBM, Magento, Oracle Commerce Cloud, Apttus are others to name few that offer competition. While Intershop has a robust solution architecture and Commerce Management, Hybris leads in customer facing touchpoints and Commerce suite capabilities.
B2C (Business 2 Consumer)
Salesforce (Demandware – Salesforce acquired it in 2016) and Hybris lead in this segment. Other players not far behind are – Digital River, IBM, Intershop, Magento and Oracle Commerce Cloud.
Read the reports below for details –
Analyst-Report-Forrester-Wave-B2C-Commerce-Suites-EN
Analyst-Report-Forrester-Wave-B2B-Commerce-Suites-EN
The Gartner Magic Quadrant* places Hybris among the leaders in E-Commerce along with Oracle, IBM and Demandware.
Summarizing Hybris
Pros
- Feature packed scalable solution
- Fully integrated options with ERP
- Supports B2B (Business 2 Business) and B2C (Business 2 Consumer)
- C4C (Cloud 4 Customer) offering
- Supports multiple interfaces
- Works online, offline and on multiple other channels
- Flexible enough to work with open source technologies
Cons
- Training may be expensive
- Professionals able to implement and train are hard to find, due to an increase of platform demand
- Customization and setup can be time and resource consuming
There are over 450 customers who have benefited from Hybris of which more than 100 are from the Fashion industry alone, including the likes of Aldo, Target, Lids etc.
Case Studies
- How can a sales personnel service customers better – Hybris Commerce provides a complete view of the customer in terms of buying habits and needs.
2. Hybris Marketing helps in numerous ways to study customer behaviour, to run campaigns, for customer segmentation and perform data analytics on a variety of data including sentiment analysis
3. Howz Monsoon Accessorize realized its potential of operating in more than 70 markets and growing by Michael Wood –
4. Hybris provided the required flexibility and scalability to Lorna Jane to expand the business and growing the online sales by 20 percent.
*Gartner is a research and advisory firm based out of US. Magic Quadrant or MQ as it is called are market research reports that analyze the participants in a particular market.
# g2crowd.com
^ aheadworks.com (slideshare.com)
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