The First Open Ecommerce Platform 
Challenge The ecommerce world has been static over the last decade - but now faces rapid, disruptive change from 3 major factors:
Social Commerce: Facebook and Twitter are driving more traffic than Google to many company websites.
Content Marketing: Only 14% of people actually click on ads. Companies need content to engage with customers.
M Commerce: In 2010, there will be more mobile phones connected to the internet than PCs.
How Will You Respond?
Old Behavior: Many companies are now moving quickly to launch one-off Facebook stores, iPhone apps, and eBooks. But this misses the fundamental point. The power of these trends is that they change consumer behavior. Simply putting part of your store on Facebook assumes the old behavior in a new place. This leads to small gains while competitors fly by.
New Behavior: We work with our clients to leverage new behaviors for explosive growth. For example, our client Rue La La grew revenue from zero to $140 million in just 2 years with the new behavior of Private Sales. Other new behaviors include social shopping, user generated merchandising, group buying, loyalty badging, geo-merchandising, etc.
What Do You Need to Succeed? You need a compelling concept, an open ecommerce platform and continual improvement.
Concept: Neither templates nor imitating others will enable you to outperform. We work with our clients to create a concept Blueprint that links objectives and personas to detailed interaction designs wrapped in a compellingly designed concept.
Open Ecommerce Platform: An ecommerce platform architected over a decade ago for the standard storefront model cannot handle the requirements of the new ecommerce reality. OCentric is the first ecommerce platform that fuses social commerce, m commerce and content marketing in an open and configurable manner for each client.
Continual Improvement: Disruptive change creates winners and losers. The winners will be the ones that learn faster through visibility across web, social and mobile and continuous testing. Our Web Insight Testing & Targeting (WITT) service combines the tools, analysts and designers to generate improvements in a cost-effective manner.
Why Optaros?Only Optaros provides all the elements to succeed with new ecommerce concepts in a reliable manner.
All the Elements to Succeed. Too many initiatives fail due to cracks between multiple vendors, ideal design and system constraints or business and IT. We fill these cracks by working jointly with the business and IT and focusing on the whole solution from design to support. Based on the success rate of our approach across hundreds of client projects, we are comfortable contractually committing to deliver a complete solution on-time and on-budget.
Reliability. Clients such as Wal-Mart, MIH Group, Hearst, Experian, McKesson and others rely on Optaros to fully manage and host their customer-facing web applications.
Why OCentric? Only OCentric can fully enable new ecommerce concepts on a cost-effective SaaS basis.
3 in 1 - Content, Commerce and Community. New ecommerce concepts require the fusing of functionality traditionally found in ecommerce platforms, web content management systems and community platforms. Only OCentric provides the functionality of these 3 traditionally siloed systems in an open and configurable manner for each client.
Open SaaS - Closed SaaS creates efficiencies by forcing all customers on the exact same software code; this frustrates companies when they can't do what they want. Open SaaS leverages open source software and cloud computing to create efficiencies equal to Closed SaaS, but with the huge benefit that each company can do what they want on their unique OCentric instance.
Key OCentric Features The total list of OCentric features is voluminous and ever growing as new modules are created every day in the open source libraries. OCentric includes all standard features found in ecommerce platforms, web content management systems and community platforms. The most interesting features are at the intersection points of these traditionally siloed areas; a select group is noted below:
Massive Modules Library - Ever increasing list of over 12,000 open source modules such as events, forums, competitions, product wizards and user generated video.
Composite App Engine - Choose layout and commerce, content and social modules to place on each page. For example, create an events page with modules for rich media, ticket purchasing, forums, and post-purchase access privileges.
Live Shopping Techniques - Retail concepts such as Private Sales, Deal-a-Day, Local-Social and Mobile Shopping experiences.
Social Integration- Native support for Facebook Connect and Twitter APIs.
Roaming Shopping Cart - Cart stays with consumer wherever they are across community and content sites - not just in the online store.
Unified Search - Shows single view of search results across the store, community and content sites.
Digital Channel Analytics - Integrated analytics that tracks activity across web, social and mobile for continuous improvement through testing and targeting.
Search Engine Optimization - All blogs, photos, Twitter feeds, and other content auto-optimize product detail pages for search traffic.
Social Personalization - Segment and target both content and products based on a customer's combined shopping and social behavior.
User-Driven Merchandising -Dynamically show products that are most searched, viewed, shared, or purchased, to create vibrancy and increase conversion rates.
Tiered Membership - Personalize content and product offerings based on customer tier and segment.
Expanded Customer Profile - Merge customers' transaction history and loyalty points with their social activity such as reviews, comments, forums, public profile, and badges.
Auto-Scaling - Cloud computing deployment provides automated response to increased traffic to ensure site performance during peak purchasing times.
OCentric is the first Software as a Service (SaaS) designed to natively address the convergence of the 3Cs (Content, Commerce & Community) - learn more by clicking through the slideshow for 6 key examples.
To learn more about the Facebook Connect Social Shopping Extension Optaros contributed to the Magento community to help retailers and brands leverage Facebook on their sites watch the video below.
