HomeChoice International, a provider of retail and financial services products, and the largest home-shopping retailer in southern Africa, has partnered with Oracle to launch a new e-commerce website hosted on Oracle Cloud Commerce (OCC).
OCC is a new commerce platform from Oracle, built as a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform from it’s popular on-prem solutions, ATG and Endeca search.
HomeChoice has more than 900 000 customers, predominantly female and very active on digital channels, with more that 86% of customers registered for digital access in the Financial Services business and over 23% of retail transactions conducted through mobile phone or web.
Dirk Oberholster, head of technology at HomeChoice, comments: “We are exceptionally proud to be the first to go live with the technology solution in Africa. The implementation of OCC is part of our journey to take advantage of best of breed cloud solutions, drive our business growth plans and support the changing needs of our customers who are becoming more digital. We are committed to provide an easy and seamless shopping experience for all our customers, not only for purchases but also account management.”
He adds: “HomeChoice’s unique customer proposition of bundling products for purchase on credit resulted in challenging implementation requirements and Oracle provided ongoing support with enhancements to the product to suit these distinctive needs.”
OCC plays a pivotal role in HomeChoice’s technology strategy to replace its legacy monolithic application with cloud-based systems supported by service-based architecture built in-house.
The new website will make it easier for customers to browse HomeChoice’s diverse digital catalogue and manage their account more efficiently, from updating contact information to requesting settlement letters.
Future plans for OCC see it being extended into other customer facing systems, such as those in use by customer services teams and sales agents.
The OCC platform receives quarterly updates from Oracle, bringing enhancement and new features allowing HomeChoice to continually improve the digital experience for its customers.
HomeChoice has gradually rolled out the new website over the past month to allow for feedback from early adopters to be implemented before launching to all customers.
“Working in conjunction with our customer analytics team, we’ve identified customers to be included in an early phase rollout to solicit feedback. We’re now fully live and will use this platform to bring exciting innovation to our customers,” says Oberholster.