Oracle Technologies Help Leading Dot-Com Retailers Service Customers During Online Holiday Shopping Spike
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Dec. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- (http://www.oracle.com/tellmemore/?133971) Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), the number one choice for e-business, announced today that the Internet's leading "dot-com" retailers are meeting the needs of online consumers using Oracle(R) technology. Dot-com companies such as GreatEntertaining.com, KBkids.com, Miadora, S3, Inc., SingleShop.com and Wine.com are using scaleable Oracle-powered e-commerce Web sites to service this year's 10 million online holiday shoppers.
Fighting bad weather, traffic jams and crowded shopping malls may be things of the past, as both new and veteran holiday shoppers placed more than one million orders on Thanksgiving Day alone. That number is expected to grow exponentially and translate into holiday revenues of $9 billion by the end of December, 1999 according to industry analysts.
According to Jupiter Communications, U.S. consumers will deluge the most popular sites with an average of 58,000 transactions per day, doubling the average of 29,000 transactions per day last season. To meet the high expectations of this year's online holiday shoppers, merchants needed to prepare for an expected spike in Web traffic. Oracle's Applications and database technology made it possible for dot-com retailers to achieve greater efficiencies and handle secure end-to-end transactions.
"The dot-coms choose Oracle because it enables them to deliver reliable, secure, scaleable, highly available customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Mark Jarvis, Oracle's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "When it comes to building a successful e-business, it is their software that differentiates them from the pack."
In the midst of unprecedented site traffic and record online sales, dot-com retailers GreatEntertaining.com, KBkids.com, Miadora, S3, Inc., SingleShop.com and Wine.com are finding themselves well-equipped to handle the flood of shoppers due to their Oracle-powered Web sites.
GreatEntertaining.com
GreatEntertaining.com, the online party supplies and entertaining ideas company, uses Oracle8i(TM) technologies to maintain its comprehensive, up-to-the-minute customer order and inventory information, ensuring a superior consumer experience and drawing a loyal customer audience.
"With the large number of consumers online this season, it is essential to not only have a well-designed site, but also the back-end infrastructure to provide visitors with a quick and convenient shopping experience the very first time they visit our site," said Tanya Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Great Entertaining, Inc. "At GreatEntertaining.com, we aim to exceed holiday shoppers' expectations and keep them coming back in the future."
KBkids.com
KBkids.com, a joint venture between Consolidated Stores Corporation, the operator of more than 1,300 K*B Toys retail stores nationwide, and BrainPlay.com, a major children's product e-tailer, converted its Web site to Oracle8i in September, 1999. Part of KBkids.com's attractiveness to customers comes from its focus on content and community. KBkids.com's Oracle8i platform supplies the functionality for the storage, management and search capabilities of text and multimedia content.
"Our Oracle software solution enables us to maximize site performance and capacity, expand scaleability and deliver a reliable system," said Shawn Davison, vice president of Technology at KBkids.com. "This means that we're in a great position to meet all of our online retail customer needs during the holidays, as well as any future rise in demand related to the growth of electronic commerce."
Miadora
Miadora offers a trusted place where shoppers can discover and explore an extensive selection of contemporary, upscale jewelry from the best designers in the world. Miadora combines its unique products with Oracle technologies to create a superior, convenient shopping experience for consumers. Miadora's Oracle8i-based Web site manages all site content and provides the reliability, 24x7 availability, and scaleability the business requires in order to support customers with superior service. Oracle's Financial Applications enable Miadora to make real-time forecasting decisions and allow the company to keep up with the high-volume demand from shoppers during the holiday season.
"In the age of e-business, it is critical that we can analyze our real-time financial reports to keep close tabs on our supply and demand ratio," said Barry Gilbert, CEO at Miadora. "With Oracle's Financial solution, Miadora is fully prepared to respond to our customers' needs this busy holiday season and throughout the year."
S3, Inc.
S3, Inc., a communications, graphics and home networking company, develops and sells everything from motherboards to modems to graphics cards. Its MP3 product, the Rio, is the second most searched for term on the Internet. S3 recently implemented Oracle's E-Business Suite, which is comprised of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, and launched a new version of its site in July. Integrated Oracle e-business applications allow the company to seamlessly automate and simplify processes from the time a customer logs into the site until the notification of the credit card receipt from the bank. The company's Web site, www.s3.com, is one of the 10 most-visited computer hardware sites in the world receiving 90,000 to 95,000 hits per day.
"Our customers' experience is our top priority," said Bernie Miller, vice president and CIO at S3, Inc. "Keeping customers happy during the busiest season of the year means we need e-business applications that are proven and known to be the best in the industry. We chose Oracle to power our Web site during this holiday season and in the future."
Singleshop.com
SingleShop.com uses the Oracle8i database to store all of its transaction data, user records, customer purchase histories and customer service records. In anticipation of exponentially growing traffic, SingleShop.com chose Oracle for its reliability and scalability, allowing the company to add more categories, more merchants and more customers as the business grows over time.
"As the only site where customers can compare products, shop with a single cart and checkout with one transaction all across multiple merchants, SingleShop.com delivers the most convenient, streamlined shopping experience on the Internet. That means we need critical customer data at our fingertips around the clock," said Bob London, VP of Marketing for SingleShop.com. "With so much at stake we chose Oracle to make sure SingleShop.com can be responsive to our customers' online shopping needs."
Wine.com
Wine.com, the leading online retailer of wine, specialty foods, and gifts, was established in 1994 with the mission to use technology to enrich the shopping experience and re-establish personal service as a principle rule of retailing. Wine.com has doubled sales volume each year, and in 1998, adopted Oracle technology to keep pace with its growth.
"The increase in site traffic during the holidays carries the risk of unacceptable performance," said Bill Newlands, president and CEO at wine.com. "Oracle will allow us to maintain our high performance standards and commitment to service during this busy online shopping period."
To address the needs of the explosive electronic business market, Oracle offers a wide range of products and services including: Oracle8i, the industry's leading database, application development and business intelligence tools, mobile computing technology as well as middle-tier technologies such as application servers. Oracle's software products are Internet-based and take full advantage of Internet open standards including Java and XML. Oracle also offers consulting, education and support services.
Oracle Corporation is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. With annual revenues of more than $9.3 billion, the company offers its database, application server, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education, and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world.
For more information about Oracle Corporation, please call 650-506-7000. Oracle's World Wide Web address is (URL) oracle.com
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