Chris had the following insights regarding Micros-RETAIL for this past holiday season.  Many of Micros-RETAIL’s clients had great success from Black Friday to Cyber Monday and that tremendous performance continued throughout the holiday season, with performance up over last year by as much as 70%.

Although Chris could not elaborate specifically on which clients, because of confidentially reasons, a number of these clients experienced:

• Re-platform resulted in 5x the total online sales
• Re-platform resulted in 76% increase in sales from 2008 to 2009
• 70% increase in sales after checkout redesign
• 47.9 % increase in total online revenue post re-platform
• 13% increase in AOV after site merchandising redesign
• Re-platform resulted in 8x revenue increase in 12 months
• Re-platform resulted in increase from $4M/day to $8M/day within 12 months
• Revenue is 15% above plan after re-platform
• 20% of total business is online, fully integrated Micros-RETAIL-built Gift Registry Solution is 45% of those sales
• Year over year sales are up 40% post re-platform
• Year to year revenue up 30% in first quarter post re-platform

Chris also expressed that other divisions of Micros-RETAIL had similar customer experiences with their other software application suites last year.  One additional item that Chris did elaborate on was the new Serenade product release 2.5 which was just release at the end of January.  Some of the features in this release include:

• Pre-Order Quote Processing
• Customer Item History screen – provides customer service representatives a more efficient way to view items that a customer has previously ordered
• Credit card security enhancements – Ability to purge / replace credit card data and retain the order
• Ability to fulfill backorders from retail store inventory using integration with MICROS’s Locate Order Broker
• Membership cancellation emails – A base membership cancellation HTML email template has been provided that you can use as-is or as a starting point to create your own HTML email template
• Ability to email purchase order form as an attachment
• Warehouse Receiving using wireless / hand-held devices
• Physical Inventory count entry using wireless / hand-held devices
• Updated online user help and other reference manuals

Chris also stated that in FY’09 they added more than 50 new customers across the Micros-Retail brands.  Pretty impressive for a down economy!

Paul Sobota is vice president of F. Curtis Barry & Company, a multichannel operations and fulfillment consulting firm with expertise in multichannel systems, warehouse, call center, inventory, and benchmarking; Learn more online at: http://www.fcbco.com