1. The Vermont Country Store’s Journey to Oracle Commerce Cloud
John Spencer
Director Technology & E-Commerce
The Vermont Country Store

2. Who We Are Founded in 1946 by Vrest Orton, 3rd generation family-owned
Direct marketing (catalog), e-commerce, and retail (two stores, both in VT)
Portray Country Store image – but maintain a modern website and technology operation

3. The Evolution of E-Commerce at VCS
Oracle Commerce Cloud
ATG – Oracle Commerce
Abandoned re-platform
Home grown
MarketLive
EOne

4. Our Structure VCS Philosophy – we buy off-the-shelf software
Integrations, configuration/scripting, data
Digital team
5 merchandisers / creative
2 front end developers / administrators
3 Operations
1 SEO and special projects
Rely on system integrators for “back-end” development, integrations, and platform technical expertise

5. The move to ATG at VCS Contracted in 2011, go-live in 2012
Worked with System Integrator (KnowledgePath/DMI) to implement ATG
Several years and many dollars to stabilize and make it ours
With no developers in-house all changes (enhancements, bug-fixes, etc.) went through SI
Stability of hosting was important so we went with top tier platform (SparkRed)

6. The Realities of Oracle Commerce for VCS
“Oracle Commerce enables selling experiences that drive clicks and conversions for the world’s biggest and best brands.”
The platform was solid, stable, and powerful, but… for a small to mid-sized company
Upgrades were expensive
Price tag of on-going maintenance was high
Extensive external integrations
New platform vs. upgrade path
Chose Oracle Commerce Cloud in early 2016
If we were a billion $ company or had staff programmers or were international or…ATG would have been ideal.
3 Years after implementation we had reached limitations with our current version of ATG – not responsive, Endeca was pricey
Day to day operations were expensive for a company of our size -
Crossroads – upgrade was essentially a new implementation
Surveyed industry including cloud and on-premise solutions

7. The Oracle Commerce Cloud Journey
Signed with Oracle and SI in March 2016
Target was to go live in July
Development was slower than anticipated
First time implementation for the SI
Oracle Commerce Cloud was still developing
We started chasing releases
Stability issues
Jumping on new features – payments, multi-ship
A 14 week implementation had been thrown around as the “standard”

8. OCC Integrations OCC Inte-gration Layer CW Direct In:
Order Management System
Product Ratings and Reviews
Adobe Analytics
Sales Tax
Payment Processing (CC, Gift Card, PayPal)
Out:
Search
Content Management
Mobile
Testing
Content Delivery Network
Website
OCC
AWS
Inte-gration
Layer
Order Management CW
Direct
Main integration was with CWDirect, our OMS
Other integrations included: ratings & reviews, taxes, payment processing, gift cards, ESP, etc.

9. Sliding the timeline
By June it was obvious we wouldn’t go-live in July
Reset to August go-live
More testing
Pushed as far as September 15th
Reset to January
Limited testing and development in Q4
Our advantage was that our ATG site was solid and stable – we did not want to compromise our customer experience

10. Changes in the New Year Transitioned from SI to Oracle Commerce Cloud
Consulting (OC3)
Closer to the product
Had more experience
Strong support from Product Development
More testing and more fixes
Happy path was solid – alternate routes were not
Soft launch internally for employees in early March – results were good

11. The Launch Launched on March 21, 2017
Cut-over was smooth – practiced and utilized go-live checklist
Designed so that transition should be transparent to customers – UI changes had already been made in ATG
Minor issues:
CDN and redirects – got resolved quickly
Not significantly different than any other platform cut-over – testing and preparation paid off

12. Post-Launch to Q4 Code Freeze
Worked with Oracle Operations during a series of live issues / outages where customers could not place orders or checkout
Worked with Product team to move critical functions out of integration layer either to base product or by making use of Server Side Extensions
Business team learned how to use the admin tool – catalog, publishing, promotions, etc.
This last bullet was key to on-going stability

13. The Real Test – Holidays
Very successful Q4
On-line sales were up 10% over 2016.
On-line average order value was up 6% over 2016.
Mobile sales increased by more than 10% year-over-year.
Infrastructure was solid
Increase in multi-ship order, gift messages, account creation, etc. found previously hidden defects
Inventory refresh frequency issues identified on busiest days

14. One Year Post Launch
We continue to work closely with both Oracle Consulting and Oracle Product team
Upgrades continue to bring useful and key features to the product.
Integration layer continues to shrink – continue to leverage out of the box functionality
Diving deeper into Experiments and AI
We want more partners in our journey
“Taking Commerce to the Next Level with Artificial Intelligence and AI Apps” – tomorrow at 5:45 Room 216

17. Questions / Discussion
John Spencer Director, Technology & E-Commerce