- Key Considerations for choosing Retisio Commerce
Customer Needs
What customer needed to run a successful business
- A single cloud-based solution which functions both as a digital experience platform and an eCommerce solution. Moving to a headless, API-based architecture that allows us to decouple digital experience from eCommerce engine, giving us greater flexibility in the future
- The ability to sell products (digital and physical) through an eCommerce solution, integrating with a payment provider. The ability to run rules-based coupons or promotions is key. There should be the ability to enable customer self-service through native or extended functionality
- Robust content management – provides merchandisers the ability to independently build pages based on product content
- A modern, decoupled, customer-facing experience which supports mobile web design standards
- An API layer allowing automated access to internal and external systems. Integration with next-generation systems, allowing us to connect to standard systems but augmenting that functionality with machine learning enabling personalized experiences for our customers
- Provide integration points for future technical solutions. Opportunity to further leverage managed and ML/AI driven personalized content is desired
THE EXPECTATION 
The Need to Replatform
The Oracle ATG platform was no longer able to support customers strategic goals & vision for creating business value and improving the online eCommerce business
- Slow site speed and responsiveness. The old ATG-based site had grown unstable, resulting in slow loading time
- Lack of scalability. Scaling could only be achieved by deploying multiple instances of the entire application, resulting in more overall memory and computing resource usage and potentially introduce DB locking issues
- Time To Market new features. It took too long to develop new features on the old platform, and the backlog of projects in IT is becoming unmanageable and cost prohibitive
- Business friendly features: The platform did not have business friendly tooling. Merchandizers could not effectively setup differentiated user experiences leading to increased conversion rates and lasting brand image
- Customization: The platform allowed easy storefront extensions; however, imposed rigid restrictions on the business tools not allowing any extension capabilities
- Old JSP based technology stack. The ATG solution used outdated JSP and Servlet technology stack
- Fault isolation cannot be contained. The platform solution has many inter-dependencies with no guarantee of change isolation and risk of single point of failure
- Forced Upgrades. The platform involved costly and time-consuming upgrades with very minimal functionalities being released
- Cumbersome & time-consuming deployments: Introducing even minor changes to a single component or adding new features requires having to rebuild, do full application regression testing, and deploy the entire solution again. This process is time-consuming and prevents faster release cycles
- Costly Maintenance. The platform required significant investment of support resources to keep it up and running. Most of customer’s IT effort went into managing platform issues
- Site Outages: The online site would go down unexpectedly for short durations
- Slow Browsing: Traffic overload would eventually lead to degradation in site loading times
- High focus on operations: IT & development teams had to focus on IT operations, maintenance activities, capacity planning, peak readiness planning, 24x7 monitoring and service management
The Need to Replatform
- Falling sales
- Business tool difficult to use
- Most of time spent on
- Site stability issues
- Downtime issues
- Holiday scalability issues
- Specialist IT support needed
- Large customization codebase
- Low conversion, High bounce rates
- Year-on-Year product support cost
2019 ATG Platform Stats
- Avg. Page Load Time – 8.16 s
- Site Bounce Rate > 70%
- Conversion rate < 0.5%
The search for the ideal platform
- Seamless Replacement. The ability to easily replace the legacy platform without loss in capability and seamless integration with existing 3rd party vendors. The ability to easily extend platform features
- 15 Year Future Proof Technologies. Platform should be built on stable, mature technology stack leveraging modern technologies like Cloud, DevOps, AI/ML, modern UI & be relevant for the next 15 years
- Scalability. The platform should scale in an elastic & dynamic manner avoiding high infrastructure management costs
- Business Agility & Tooling. Platform should empower merchandisers, and other business owners to influence customer behavior
- Superior Search. Platform should provide superior search experiences that can significantly increase online revenue
- Integration & Interoperability. Platform should easily integrate with a myriad of internal and external sub-systems and processes, & allow for their in-flexibilities
- Strong System Integrator who understands our business: A platform is only as strong as its Service Implementation (SI) team. In addition, we should find it easy to find resources
- Transparent pricing: Fixed, transparent fees with low cost of ownership
- Traditional platforms. Ex: Oracle ATG, Hybris These platforms are now considered legacy
- Home grown solution. Ex: SpringBoot, .Net Needs a technically strong and invested IT team. Very difficult to build and maintain
- Cloud SaaS platforms. Ex: SFCC, OCC, Shopify Generally built as a multi-tenant solution. Easy to launch, difficult to customize & differentiate
- Cloud-Native platforms. . Ex: ARC, CommerceTools Modern, Microservices-based, Cloud Native, Headless
The Platform should Power Future Growth
The eCommerce platform serves as the backbone of the eCommerce experience, powering catalog management, browse and search, promotions, merchandising, cart, checkout, account and administrative functions. At the same time, it needs to ensure that it is able to support macro trends that are gaining momentum across the globe. Over a period of time, Customer expects to leverage the eCommerce investment to power other parts of the business. For example:
- The platform should be able to work with future trends like augmented reality, sensory technology, geo-fencing, and micro-location beacons and allow the business to create relevant use cases
- Omnichannel initiatives to create a more seamless customer experience across consumer touchpoints
- Big Data and analytics to leverage structured and unstructured data to deliver more relevancy and personalization
- Allow new products/promotions to be pushed to market quicker when they are relevant to the customer
- Support different contract types, catalogs, price lists, and discounting structures to be set up
- Support customer profiles and organizational profiles such as an “account” or a “business”
- Support self-service options, automating many customer interactions
- Quickly and efficiently deal with customer service issues
- Allow IT teams to shift focus from managing-the-system to focus on innovation and strategy
- Manage inventory across multiple distribution points effectively
- Help increase the speed of order fulfillment
- Fully integrate online and brick-and-mortar channels and in-house systems
About Retisio Commerce
Retisio Commerce – A Cloud Native Commerce Platform
Modern, Reactive Microservices, API-First, Headless, Cloud Native, AI/ML Driven Commerce Platform. Designed to be a highly responsive, resilient and elastic platform
PRE-LOADED OOTB FEATURES
Retisio Commerce supports 80% of most common customizations other platforms go through
OMNICHANNEL EXPERIENCE
An e-commerce solution tailored to your business needs across digital touchpoints
EASILY CUSTOMIZABLE
Allows businesses to constantly innovate and embrace transformation
FUTURE READY TECHNOLOGY STACK
Accelerate time to market and meet business goals in a single unified platform
POWERFUL & HEADLESS
Build unique customer journeys through any channel and interface using our production grade APIs
HIGHLY SCALABLE
Accelerate the growth of your business and adjust to your evolving needs
THE OUTCOME 
5X improvements in conversion rate
Sub 2s vs. 7-10 in legacy platform
Runs using 3/5th of Infrastructure
in minutes vs. hours in legacy
Developers are 30% more productive
80% less code compared to implementation
Improved from 41ms to 27ms
Reduced development time by 3x
Commerce Capabilities
Retisio Commerce provides market-leading value for your business, IT & your customers right out-of-the-box
Retisio Commerce provides market-leading value for your business, IT & your customers right out-of-the-box
Business Friendly Tools to Manage the Store Front
Built on a cloud platform that incorporates best practices and mature next-gen technologies, Retisio Commerce offers tools simple enough for business users to manage
Modern, Future-ready Technology Stack
Retisio Commerce is more than a commerce storefront. It is built with mature, next-gen reactive microservices technology stack allowing it to accelerate time-to-value, reduce infrastructure & cloud costs and takes full advantage of the distributed nature of the cloud and is resilient to failure, highly efficient, and operative at any scale
Intelligent Search
Increased engagement through better product findability
As shoppers type in keywords, Intelligent Search delivers highly relevant results through self-learning search, dynamic filters, high level of error tolerance, identifies inflections and user intent, provides rich, intuitive suggestions and more
Increase conversion rate through better accuracy
Once the shopper types in the search term on the site, AI-powered search uses NLP, semantic processing, and ML algorithms to surface extremely relevant search results
Improve the ranking on Search Result Page with context determination features
Facet Recognition
With Facet Recognition feature, SIT maps each keyword of user’s search query to relevant facets/attributes. This information is used to give the most relevant products first on the search result page
Category type Identification
With Category type Identification feature, SIT finds intended category and gives relevant products on search result page
Intent Identification
With Intent Identification feature SIT is able to find user’s intent for price and gives very relevant products according to user’s context
The ranking of products on search result page is done using these context determination features so that users get the most relevant and complete result set for each of their search queries
Intelligent Type-ahead
Intelligent Type-ahead predicts what user is going to type based on actual past search queries. User doesn’t have to type entire search query, she can just select from the list of predictions generated by intelligent type-ahead.
Auto Spelling and Space Correction
This feature corrects Spelling and Spacing mistakes in search queries, so that user doesn’t have to type again and again to get the right products
Breadcrumb Negation
Breadcrumb negation gives removable tokens from user’s search query, so that user can just remove one of the words/tokens to tweak the query
Recent Search
List of recently searched queries, so that user can resume from right where she left off
Recommendations Experience Engine (RxE)
Increase Average Order Value (AOV) through increased relevancy
The order in which product content is displayed in the default view of search results can be influenced based on analytics information
Shopper relevancy can be personalized based on a combination of factors such as location, preferences, previous browse behavior, products owned etc
Increased conversion rate through better accuracy
Once the shopper types in the search term on the site, AI-powered search uses NLP, semantic processing, and ML algorithms to surface extremely relevant search results
Improve Engagement and Cross-sell, Up-Sell on Product Detail Page
View-View
view-view recommendation shows all the other products that were viewed by other users, when this product was also viewed by them
Bought-Bought
Bought-bought recommendation shows all the other products that were Bought by other users, when this product was also bought by them
Frequently Bought Together
Frequently bought together recommendation shows other products that were bought by other users in the same order when this product was also Bought by them
View-Bought
view-bought recommendation shows other products that were bought by other users when this product was also viewed by them
- Improve engagement on Home Page and Landing Pages with best selling recommendations
- Best Sellers for Specific Category
- Best Sellers across Categories
- Brand Specific Best Sellers
- Give a peek into what’s trending with top trending recommendations
- Top Trending
- Trending Now
- Top Trending for Category
- Most Loved Products
- Give recommendations specifically curated for users needs
- Personalized recommendations
- Recently viewed and affinity to recently viewed
How Retisio Commerce helped a retailer achieve success
Retisio Commerce had all the functionality and business tools necessary to create an engaging customer experience, improve customer conversion, and simplify management. Built on a reactive microservices platform, it allowed us to extend functionality as and when we needed to
- Superior Customer Experience: Consumers are now able to easily find items and quickly complete their transactions
- Future-proof solution: Retisio Commerce is built with modern concepts & highly optimized concepts like Headless, API-First, Cloud Native, Responsive, CloudOps, AI/ML Driven Intelligence, Auto Scaling, Self-Healing, High Availability, High Throughput, Low Latency Response Times, Cloud Agnostic Container-based Architecture amongst others, which makes it relevant for the next 15-20 years
- Search Speed & Accuracy: Retisio Commerce leverages AI/ML to efficiently improve the Search Experience. Features include Auto-Suggest, Auto Spell Correction, Auto Space, "Did You Mean", Thesaurus entries, Keyword Redirects, Dynamic Facets, Recent Search, Breadcrumb Negation, Facet Recognition, Category Type Identification, Intent Identification, enabling significant improvement in search relevancy
- Site Speed: Retisio Commerce is built with high-speed Reactive Microservices architecture allowing it to power highly responsive sub-2 second load time. It uses in-memory operational data, efficient queue handoff, messaging/streaming, shading services, bulkheads, circuit-breakers, ability to handle back-pressure and micro-batch streaming, along with async, non-blocking calls to handle more calls on a single node. All this allowed Retisio Commerce to effectively employ vertical and horizontal scaling allowing it to do more with less hardware
THE OUTCOME 
Comparative Analysis
With changing customer trends, channels and technologies creating a new era in eCommerce, retailers cannot afford to use old tools and technologies. To succeed & grow, they need a modern commerce platform that can seamlessly scale to react to changing business
