In early 2005, catalog technology and services vendor Ecometry acquired Blue Martini, a provider of e-commerce platforms, contact center and marketing technology and services. In late 2006, order management and fulfillment vendor GERS acquired Ecometry, pulling together the numerous offerings of the three companies under a new banner, Escalate Retail.
This week, Escalate Retail has introduced a new version of its package of products, now called “Buy Anywhere, Fulfill Anywhere Commerce,” that fully integrates all company offerings.
“After the merger we built interfaces that linked systems, but today we now have integrated the systems using web services,” says Dave Bruno, director of product marketing at Escalate Retail. “Now all of our various channel products can communicate seamlessly.”
In addition to integration, the new version of the suite includes Microsoft Tag, newly released technology that aims to take mobile commerce to a new level.
Escalate Retail has included m-commerce site-building in previous versions of its suite, connecting m-commerce sites with systems in the suite. Now, Microsoft Tag enables retailers to create tags—two-dimensional bar codes—that contain information and commands that link to m-commerce sites. Smartphone users who download Microsoft’s tag reader application can use their phone’s camera to snap a picture of the tag, which then automatically links them to a specific landing page on an m-commerce site.
The tag reader downloadable mobile application essentially turns a smartphone into a bar code reader. Retailers can then use these bar code readers to promote products or m-commerce sites by, for example, including 2D bar codes in magazine ads or on signs in airports. Once a consumer gets to an m-commerce site, he can complete a transaction via his mobile phone or order via the phone and pick up merchandise in store.
“Mobile commerce is rapidly evolving, and 2009 is going to be the breakout year,” Bruno says. “Tags will accelerate the evolution of the mobile phone as a legitimate shopping tool. They eliminate the need to type in URLs on a phone, and they enable consumers to buy anything anywhere you can place a bar code.”
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