Office Depot, Inc.
reigns #1 in E-Commerce Search Engine Usability for office supply retailers and #8 overall
among the top 50 e-commerce retailers (Baymard Institute). By steadily
innovating to improve search and provide more personalized recommendations,
Office Depot has made it easier for customers to take advantage of its full
breadth of products and services online and via mobile devices.
Serving a complex and loyal customer base that includes a wide variety of large corporations, small and medium-sized businesses as well as individual consumers, Office Depot offers the perfect mix of nearby locations and online convenience. The retailer operates more than 2,000 Office Depot and OfficeMax stores in the U.S. and Europe, and its combined web sites rank it among the top 5 e-commerce retailers in the 2014 Internet Retailer 500.
At the heart of Office Depot’s Customer Experience (CX) strategy is a complex merchandising operation that ensures that each business and consumer enjoys a world-class customer experience, no matter when, where and how choose to shop. The company places over 100,000 products and services at it’s customers’ fingertips, with selections ranging from technology, core office supplies, print and document services, business services, facilities products, furniture, and school essentials.
Office Depot is focused on making a wide assortment of products and services easy for its customers to access, and convenient to shop. To render the complex simple and deliver faster, more personalized search and recommendations, Office Depot recently upgraded its e-commerce search and recommendation engine with Oracle Commerce Experience Manager.
Speaking earlier this year from Oracle OpenWorld, Office Depot senior e-commerce analyst Scott Headberg said the retailer upgraded its systems to meet its stringent business requirements, including the need to accommodate unique merchandising rules to ensure that the right product assortments and promotions reach every shopper at OfficeDepot.com.
In addition, with the e-commerce update Office Depot and OfficeMax customers can continue to enjoy a personalizedshopping experience with secure access to their purchase history and product preferences. Ultimately, the Oracle system serves as a single e-commerce platform supporting Office Depot’s consumer, business-to-business and international divisions.
Customers enjoy the benefits of a commerce site that seems to know just what they want. With the recent changes, Office Depot makes it easier for customers to take advantage of its full breadth of products and services online, via mobile and using the tablets and kiosks that extend each store’s offering.
The Oracle Commerce user interface is straight-forward and easy to integrate, making it possible for merchants to directly shape and control the user experience.
“These tools, put in the right hands, allow for more successful promotions that are designed for specific regions and categories,” said Headberg. “We are empowering our merchandising teams to achieve their goals, while taking some of the burden off of the development team.”
Office Depot collaborated with Oracle and RealDecoy, an Oracle Gold Partner specializing in end-to-end Oracle Commerce solutions for retailers and manufacturers, to help manage this highly sophisticated implementation and ensure that the retailer met all of its business objectives. The result is an easy, intuitive experience for customers to shop via mobile device, tablet or desktop computer.
The upgraded e-commerce environment has helped to establish a new reality in which business users are simply more self-reliant, says Headberg. It helped to end an era in which development staff were required to help create landing pages, code promotions, and update content. Today, business users leverage the Oracle application to fine-tune the customer experience, personalize search results and recommendations, and adjust promotions in real-time.
In other news: Office Depot is among the first to accept Apple Pay. (Wall Street Journal)
Shop. Explore. Demo. Oracle Commerce @ Work: www.officedepot.com