Connected Commerce

Reaching consumers where they are and how they live

In a difficult economic climate, digital media provide opportunities for consumer goods manufacturers to differentiate themselves, increase customer loyalty, and optimize costs. Today's value-driven customers are engaged in a digital lifestyle focused on interactivity and valuable online experiences. Things like user-generated content, social networking, and information-rich Web applications, originally included under the heading of "Web 2.0," are creating an overall shift in the customer shopping experience and in the expectations shoppers have for interacting with businesses, brands, and products.

Microsoft solutions for Connected Commerce help consumer goods manufacturers deliver powerful consumer experiences fast while also driving down operational complexities and costs.

To reach today's value-driven consumers, consumer goods companies and their retail partners must create personal, interactive, and social experiences that engage and excite shoppers. Whether the transaction is finalized on a retail partner's site or integrated into a branded site maintained by the consumer goods manufacturer, there must be a consistent brand experience across a range of media-on the Web, on a mobile device, or in a store. We call this approach "Customer Centricity 2.0"-and it is focused on reaching consumers with compelling experiences wherever they are.

Connecting with the new e-savvy consumer

For most consumer goods manufacturers and retailers, e-commerce is a fast-growing revenue channel and a key asset for building and maintaining customer loyalty. As technology and devices are integrated into customers' daily activities, customers are exploring and experiencing products in new ways. Members of Netgen and Gen X use technology in ways that previous generations did not, juggling messages from multiple media at once. It's getting harder for advertisers to break through and have their messages heard. But the growth of online social networking and the proliferation of blogging and product review sites offer opportunities, as well as challenges, for retailers to reach a new and e-savvy generation of customers.

As retailers invent new avenues to interact with customers, e-commerce is becoming a key strategic differentiator and central to most retailers' growth strategies. But a retailer's e-commerce solution may well have been developed separately from the rest of its business-and certainly from the rest of its trade initiatives. This challenge makes it difficult to transact traditional and online business in an integrated way.

Whether you choose to manage the transaction yourself or with a retail partner, Microsoft enables consumer goods manufacturers to deliver valuable, rich experiences to consumers through e-commerce solutions that are fully integrated with the rest of the digital marketing experience, quickly and easily accommodating the creation of multichannel customer experiences. Microsoft solutions for Connected Commerce help consumer goods manufacturers deliver powerful consumer experiences fast while also driving down operational complexities and costs.

The Microsoft advantage: An unmatched breadth of solutions for connecting the transaction with the rest of the marketing mix aimed at the technology-savvy consumer

Microsoft offers the breadth of solutions, technologies, and experiences that consumers crave. And Microsoft is a powerful partner, with cost-effective solutions that better connect information, systems, and people to give consumer goods companies a competitive advantage through enhanced online consumer experiences, easy-to-manage Web sites, and simplified integration across channels.

SolutionsBusiness ChallengesBenefits

Enterprise cloud services

Leverage Microsoft-hosted services to easily and cost-effectively deliver an enhanced customer experience.

Addressing e-commerce business challenges

Often, underlying systems are not integrated between online and offline operations. Business users need access to tools that provide an easy, consistent way to view, analyze, and act on customer activity across all channels.

Addressing e-commerce technology challenges

An effective e-commerce platform must address a wide range of technology challenges. To maintain IT efficiency, technology choices made within an online business unit must integrate with the corporate IT infrastructure. In addition, the platform must be easily scaled to cope with continued growth in e-commerce. Sellers need the agility to quickly create compelling shopping experiences on newly emerging channels, such as gaming and mobile consumer devices.

Cross-channel integration

With Microsoft solutions for Connected Commerce, sellers can offer integrated management and reporting across all channels of customer interaction. Consumer buying behavior can be tracked on each channel independently and across all of the channels as a whole. Promotions can be personalized and targeted to specific channels. And integrated management and reporting provide a single view of inventory and customer orders.

E-commerce platform, infrastructure, and tools

Implement all of the technology assets that enable sellers to build, host, deploy, and maintain a commerce-enabled Web presence.

Meeting the demands of digital consumers

Digital consumers expect consistent service and easy access to information regardless of the retail channel. For example, if they purchase online, customers want the option of picking up the product in a store on the same day.

Creating enhanced Web experiences

Microsoft offers powerful tools that enable developers and creative experts to work collaboratively to create wish lists, guided selling, product reviews, product comparisons, and personalized shopping. Leading-edge applications like Microsoft Silverlight power rich application experiences for truly compelling customer interactions.

Web and user experience development tools

Create the look and feel necessary for a rich customer experience with the same leading development and modeling tools used by Web site designers and creative teams.

Consumer digital assets

Engage with the digital consumer, including through digital advertising, online communities, consumer devices, search, and Web-based consumer content.

Capitalizing on revenue growth opportunities

E-commerce is growing dramatically as more people go online to purchase products and services. To capitalize on this growth, sellers are looking to add new product categories and services to their online channels.

Growing the brand

Consumer goods companies want to leverage brand equity across their available channels. They also want to interact with consumers in new ways that leverage the growing social nature of the Internet while retaining a consistent brand.

Easy-to-manage Web sites

Microsoft solutions for Connected Commerce provide a comprehensive range of solutions that make it easy to manage powerful online consumer experiences. Microsoft offers a number of role-specific capabilities built into the solution, including business tools for managing content and product catalogs, extensive inventory functions for merchandisers, and comprehensive personalization options for marketers.

Collaboration capabilities to improve retailer integration

Even if you choose to pass the transaction to a retail partner, consumers expect a consistent and easy transition from brand Web experience to checkout. Collaboration capabilities connect people, information, systems, and processes, making information continuously available on any device.

Improving information flow to create a consistent brand experience

When retailers and consumer goods manufacturers are working across organizations, the challenges of integrating diverse systems is even greater. Most organizations have a multitude of systems and technologies required for their daily operations. By bringing together these technologies in an agile and scalable way, Microsoft solutions for Connected Commerce can help unleash the potential of your existing infrastructure as well as that of your retail partners.

Improve operational efficiency

Microsoft solutions provide a suite of powerful technologies that empower developers, IT professionals, and business users to cope with the complex integration and process automation challenges involved in integrating disparate systems. With the right capabilities and tools, Microsoft solutions for Connected Commerce help companies minimize costs and create value faster. Microsoft offers many technologies that contribute to the quality and agility of integration solutions, ranging from application connectivity to business process automation and operational optimization and visibility.