Leading E-Tailers Round Out the Year with an E-Commerce Upgrade
November 22, 2004 -- This year more than ever, retailers relied on strong e-commerce platforms as an essential part of their multichannel retailing strategies. With Internet-based sales expected to rise to over $15 billion this holiday season, an increase of between 23 percent and 26 percent from this time last year (ComScore Networks), having a solid e-commerce infrastructure is crucial. Retailers need to leverage the latest technology to provide better customer service, optimize online performance levels and encourage browsers to become buyers.
Two retailers committed to ensuring the highest level of customer service, Ritz Interactive and Things Remembered, today announced that they have upgraded to IBM’s latest version of its award-winning IBM WebSphere Commerce software product.
Ritz Interactive is leveraging the strength of IBM’s e-commerce software platform to establish a strong customer base across their many brands (e.g. RitzCamera.com, WolfCamera.com, BoatersWorld.com, etc.) while it continues to develop and acquire new sites for the network. Since Ritz Interactive treats each brand as an on-line community, they have the unique challenge of retaining customers and providing domain specific content (e.g. photography and marine sports), product reviews, special contests, auctions, personal services, photo galleries, tips and advice, etc. Even though each Ritz Interactive site is independent and individually branded, to ensure stability, scalability and reliability they all operate on the same WebSphere Commerce platform 5.6. This implementation also enables Ritz Interactive to develop sites without scalability and development cycle concerns - a key market differentiator. As a result, Ritz Interactive now has the ability to launch a new site in about one week.
“Our upgrade was flawless as we migrated 15 e-commerce sites in less than 20 weeks,” said Fred H. Lerner, president and CEO of Ritz Interactive. “The benchmark tests proved that the stability under load and the performance increase was very impressive. We tested up to 1500 concurrent users with an order rate of 25 transactions per minute, the processors never fell below 25% utilization – all in all, a fantastic performance improvement.”
Customers logging on to www.ritzinteractive.com can quickly link to any of the other sites in the network. IBM’s DB2 contains the on-line catalogs for each Ritz Interactive site as well detailed customer information, order information and pictures of the products offered on-line. WebSphere MQ integrates the e-commerce system with the back-end inventory system--providing customers with the most updated view of product pricing and availability.
Also just in time for the holiday shopping season, Things Remembered, a leading and experienced retailer of personalized gifts, successfully re-launched their new site on WebSphere Commerce version 5.6 and iSeries servers. Things Remembered attributes much of its success to staying current on WebSphere Commerce releases, a strategy which enables them to aggressively deliver new business value to their customers and minimize customization costs.
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