New Oracle Payment Cloud Service Gives Retailers Greater Transparency and Pricing Flexibility

Retail brands can now accept all major payment options to give shoppers a choice in how they pay without the unexpected costs or long-term contracts.

The welcome return to in-store shopping has also brought retailers a host of unexpected payment processing fees and complexity. To help combat this challenge, Oracle today extended its comprehensive retail cloud platform to include the Oracle Retail Payments Cloud Service. With the solution, US retailers can now accept the latest in contactless payment options, including debit/credit cards and Apple, Google, and Samsung Pay, without the hidden fees and unpredictable costs that erode the bottom line. This is all with transparent, fixed-fee rate pricing with no long-term contract lock-in or monthly minimum requirements.

“Retailers have long been at the mercy of a payment ecosystem with high and unpredictable fees,” said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Retail. “Today we are extending our retail cloud platform to bring a more stable ‘payment to processing’ solution to market for a fraction of the cost. Now, retailers have a single provider to manage their in-store operations, from staffing and inventory management, through to customer engagement and transaction processing.”

One stop shop for payments through to processing

The variability of payment processing costs by provider and card type, coupled with unpredictable system stability and service fees, make it hard for retailers to estimate processing costs in their financial planning. Oracle Retail Payment Cloud Service provides a fixed rate and competitive pricing model that enables retailers to anticipate exactly how much they will pay for every transaction – regardless of payment method used. There are no additional service or convenience fees or monthly minimums.

And as the service runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), it has high security standards, end-to-end encryption, and is PCI/DSS compliant. When integrated with Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service (POS) and Oracle MICROS hardware, it provides retailers with a complete platform for payment acceptance through to processing.

The price is right

In a recent survey* of more than 8,000 global consumers, 47% noted that price is the leading factor in getting them to make a purchase. As such, retailers need the flexibility to quickly adjust prices based on market forces and consumer demand. However, with thousands of products distributed across multiple geographies, manually managing pricing changes is often laborious and inaccurate. Price Hub automates price movements and calculates the best price based on the retailer’s specific pricing strategy. Price Hub modules include:

• Price Strategies allows retailers to automate price changes based on their configured strategies using pre-defined fields such as cost, margin, area differential, or competitor. They can also build in their own unique fields as required.

• Price Modeling enables retailers to model prices based on cost, margin, or a ‘what-if’ analysis prior to making pricing updates to mitigate risk.

• Event Planning helps retailers create and manage a significant number of promotions and/or clearances. This includes supporting collaboration between teams in developing promotions and managing budget data and marketing materials.

Promotions that pay off

Second to price, the survey* showed that a special offer is what most often moves a consumer (39%) from a browser to a buyer. And 30% added that compelling offers are what attracts them to buy from new brands. Yet clearly defining and fulfilling these offers across channels is often a time-consuming headache for retailers. New extensions to Oracle Retail Customer Engagement Cloud Services eliminates these challenges to help retailers drive incremental revenue and profitability by more executing relevant offers. New modules include:

• Oracle Retail Promotion Engine Cloud Service is a highly scalable promotion management solution. Its calculation engine has built-in APIs that make it easy to integrate with a retailers’ existing transaction systems such as Point of Sale (POS), ecommerce, order management, and other shopping apps. It provides a unique ‘single point of definition’ for each promotion so retailers can publish a wide variety of offers at the same time without system confusion. This helps ensure that consumers receive a consistent purchase experience regardless of channel.

• Campaign and Deal Management Cloud Service can seamlessly publish offers into the Oracle Retail Promotion Engine to extend promotion capabilities to include single and multi-use coupons. Built-in performance scorecards provide key performance metrics on how each promotion is performing.

• Oracle Retail Customer Management and Segmentation Foundation Cloud Service securely stores customer data so that retailers can define and focus on high potential customer segments that can increase loyalty, average spend, and repeat purchases. The campaign and deal management module uses this information to get the right offers to the right customers at the right time to improve satisfaction and marketing ROI.

* The survey polled 8,107 global consumers across 11 different countries in late September 2022. Get your complimentary copy of the Oracle Retail Shopper Outlook:Consumer Research 2022 report.