Episode Details

With retail customers like Dollar Tree and White House Black Market, Oracle knows a thing or two about commerce. Their recent report, published in conjunction with CommerceNext, dives into how brands of all sizes - from DTC to Enterprise and Luxury, are investing in 2019 and beyond.

Main Takeaways:

• Bob Meixner, Director of Product Strategy - Commerce & Loyalty at Oracle, joins Phillip on today's episode.
• API-focused commerce gives brands the power and flexibility to create innovate commerce solutions.
• Headless commerce is the future, but sometimes developing standalone headless solutions brings you back to square one with functionality.
• Thanks to some insightful marketing research by Oracle, we have greater insight into where brands are spending their recently increased marketing budgets.

First Meetings and Background: Who is Bob Meixner?:

• Phillip first became aware of Bob at CommerceNext where he was a speaker with a session called "Measuring Up: How 100+ Leading Retailers are Investing in Digital Commerce".
• Back in 2006, Oracle acquired an enterprise content management vendor called Stellent (for whom Bob worked) which was one of the first acquisitions made by Oracle in the customer experience space.
• Bob later got the opportunity to lead the presales consulting team at eBay and Magento which was an exciting challenge given Magento's growth.
• Wanting to get to know a different side of the industry, Bob took his current role as being the Director of Product Strategy - Commerce & Loyalty.

Oracle Today: Who is Using the Platform?

• Phillip asks Bob to talk more about what companies are using Oracle today, especially given Phillip's perspective that it is all large scale, enterprise corporations.
• Bob informs us that they have taken a lot of time taking on-premise systems that had longer implementation times and reimagining them as a cloud solution that is API first.
• The expectation of the software vendor being the actual hosting provider of the platform is something that is a big shift from the way platforms used to be hosted.
• Oracle has developed an architecture that allows you to have total creative control and extensibility on both the frontend and the backend while not losing upgradeability and the benefits of what you would expect in modern SaaS.

Examining the Report: How Retailers are Investing in Digital Commerce:

• Phillip alludes back to Bob's talk at CommerceNext and talks about how interesting and comprehensive the report covered in the talk was.
• Oracle wanted to get a take on where folks were investing and they thought it would be helpful to publish some numbers on where digital commerce professionals were investing on a year to year comparative basis.
• Respondents include over 100 people at various large brands such as wholesale manufacturers, direct to consumer brands, multi-brand retailers, and digital-first multi-brand retailers.
• Download the report to take a look at the report yourself and get a better insight into the data.

Key Insights: What Does the Report Tell Us?:

• Great news: budgets are on the rise in regards to eCommerce marketing and interesting enough, direct to consumer brands are increasing their budgets at a higher rate than traditional retailers.
• These budget increases are being used to make transactions much more frictionless which includes things like alternative payment types and chatbots for customer service scenarios.
• If you think about a lot