NetSuite Launches Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite

First and Only On-Demand Retail Management Suite Automates Multi-Channel Sales Across CRM and ERP Functions with Real-Time Visibility

Enables Mid-Size Retailers to Lower Costs, Manage In-Store, Point of Sale and Online Sales in Real-Time, and Provide Great Customer Experience

SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of on-demand, integrated business management software suites for the mid-market enterprise and divisions of large companies, today announced NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite, a new vertical suite for retailers in North America. The new NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite allows companies to use one on-demand retail software solution to easily manage multiple locations with a sophisticated point of sale (POS) system, seamlessly integrate new or existing Ecommerce operations, provide a great customer experience across all channels, and gain real-time visibility and business intelligence across the company. These capabilities enable operational excellence, including the ability to gain visibility across an organization’s complete processes for inventory management, orders, customers, accounting, marketing, POS, and customer support across all channels. For more information about NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite, please visit http://www.netsuite.com/portal/industries/retail.shtml.

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“The business environment is currently very challenging for retailers,” said Janet Suleski, Research Director, Retail at AMR Research. “For many retailers, multi-channel is the technology Shangri-La they have been seeking. NetSuite is throwing its hat into the solutions ring with the launch of its new Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite, putting small and mid-sized retailers one step closer to achieving the true multi-channel integration. NetSuite is a welcome addition to the field of technology providers exploring the best ways to unify channels and provide complete visibility to customer activity as the mechanism for providing the best possible service.”

According to a recent research report from the analyst firm AMR, retailers are experiencing a major evolution toward third-generation systems. As many as 46% of today’s retailers plan to upgrade to their third-generation platform by 2010. Only 7% of retailers have already completed this transition, while 34% plan to stay with their first- or second-generation systems. (Source: The State of Cross-Channel Operations: 2008, AMR Research)

Limitations in traditional software have forced many companies to either build home-grown applications or use multiple silo software solutions to manage multi-channel sales. Applications from vendors such as Microsoft and Sage were originally designed a decade before the rise of the Internet. As a result, it can be very difficult and costly to extend them to support Ecommerce for a Web business. New applications from vendors such as Demandware and Volusion are designed specifically to build Ecommerce websites, but result in isolated, bolt-on systems that are difficult and costly to integrate into core business processes such as accounting, fulfillment, inventory management, shipping and marketing promotions. Consequentially, retailers lack tools to enable them to expand into Ecommerce and tie it into the rest of the businesses; lack of tools for real-time customer relationship management; and lack of real-time visibility and business intelligence across business functions.

In contrast, NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite launched today was designed to overcome those barriers in the retail market.

Essential Tools for Today’s Retail Multi-Channel Environment

NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite enables merchants to achieve operational excellence. NetSuite offers many “first and only” capabilities that are critical to retailers, including:

• Integrated Ecommerce — NetSuite allows retailers to create a website that delivers an intuitive, “Amazon.com-like” experience to their shoppers, or integrate NetSuite with an existing Web site. NetSuite provides a full-featured Web store that is seamlessly integrated with your retail locations – inventory, accounting, and customer management are all unified and available in a single system. NetSuite facilitates the fulfilment process with integrated shipping labels from UPS, FedEx and USPS and automatically retrieves and sends package tracking information to your shoppers. NetSuite enables a global presence, with multiple language and currency options and shipping customs documentation built-in. NetSuite supports the publishing of multiple websites from a single instance – allowing a merchant to present different online storefronts to different markets. And NetSuite integrates directly with eBay to publish listings and automatically import orders – all of which integrate directly to NetSuite’s inventory, order and customer management system. NetSuite’s Ecommerce software is garnering rave reviews. NetSuite won the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) 2008 CODiE Award in the software category for “Best Ecommerce Solution.” In July, Gartner placed NetSuite in the visionaries quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce” report.
• Customer Insight and Support — Customers can purchase from one channel or location, pick-up from a different one, and return merchandise to another. Retailers can get a complete view of each customer and better understand their needs and behavior – View every order a customer has ever placed, every item they have purchased, and every recorded communication, regardless of which channel was used; Collect and track detailed demographic information on any customer and provide personalized marketing to them based on purchase history or demographics; and Offer customers self-service options online to view their order history, track shipments, reorder, and get answers to their questions at any time.
• Online and Offline Marketing — NetSuite offers extensive marketing campaign and promotional capabilities to find new customers, encourage repeat business, and increase average sale size. You can create and execute highly targeted, personalized email campaigns within NetSuite, and manage online keyword and affiliate marketing. With closed-loop marketing, you can see revenues, costs and lifetime ROI for all campaigns in real-time. Automated up-sell and cross-sell functionality improves the lifetime revenue per customer through add-on products at the register or in the Web store. Shopping Cart Abandonment reports help you convert abandoned carts into sales, with automated marketing campaigns to shoppers that abandoned their cart with coupons for the items they abandoned. NetSuite also provides multiple promotional capabilities including multiple discounting capabilities, VIP pricing, volume pricing, and customer-specific discounts.
• Integrated Point of Sale (POS) Powered by OnSite — NetSuite leverages the OnSite POS system built on NS-BOS. OnSite leveraged the experience gained from serving multi-channel retail customers over several years to develop a Point-of-Sale integration specifically for NetSuite. The POS module gives retailers the power of NetSuite for all in-store transactions and supports the latest POS hardware from top vendors. OnSite capabilities include issuing custom designed Gift Cards that can be used in-store and online, electronic signature capture, and manager security overrides for refunds and other sensitive activities.
• Real-Time Visibility and Business Intelligence – NetSuite provides you real-time visibility into inventory, sales, customers, finances, marketing and customer support across all channels and locations. You can measure the profitability of channels, customers and inventory; and identify the top selling items and top buying customers. NetSuite provides Marketing ROI reports that tell you the effectiveness of each campaign in real-time. And NetSuite includes automated procurement and cross-sell tools that can initiate purchase orders and can recommend cross-sells based on past sales history.

“We believe that NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite allows mid-sized retailers to achieve operational excellence and provide their customers with a much better customer experience – capabilities that weren’t previously available to them because of their high cost and complexity are now available thanks to NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite,” said Baruch Goldwasser, Etail/Retail Business Manager at NetSuite. “NetSuite’s low cost and intuitive interface allows retailers to leverage the knowledge they gain by serving customers every day and transfer that knowledge into a much larger market. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a mid-sized retailer somewhere in Iowa became the next Wal-Mart using the tools we are making available to them – it’s that powerful.”

Today there are a number of businesses that have already taken advantage of NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite. These businesses include:

EcoBox (www.ecobox.com), Austin, Texas

EcoBox sells both new and used boxes and other packing material to individuals and businesses. By keeping used but serviceable boxes in circulation, the company estimates it has kept one million boxes from being discarded. To expand its reach beyond a single warehouse location, EcoBox opened its first retail store in February 2006. But its Peachtree-based accounting system offered no integration and no point-of-sale capabilities. Two years after initially adopting NetSuite to manage its operations, EcoBox adopted capabilities developed by NetSuite partner OnSite to improve its point-of-sale capabilities, which brought an added level of efficiency and accuracy to the company’s warehouse and two retail locations. NetSuite’s multi-channel Retail Management Suite has lead to faster and more accurate transactions, helping EcoBox double the amount of business it does beyond driving distance of its stores, reflecting a greater online reach.

“NetSuite has been a phenomenal fit for our business,” said Dale Malone, Managing Partner, EcoBox. “Overall our transactions are 20 to 30 percent faster with NetSuite’s multi-channel Retail Management Suite, and the barcode scanning has certainly improved our checkout accuracy. My nightly closeout takes only half the time.”

Wrigleyville Sports (www.wrigleyvillesports.com) Chicago, and (www.thepittsburghfan.com) Pittsburgh

Because of strong performances by the Chicago Cubs and Pittsburgh Steelers, including this month’s Super Bowl win by the Steelers, daily order volumes at Wrigleyville Sports’ Web site and three retail locations have as much as quadrupled on a year-over-year basis, and the mounting order volume has been smoothly handled by the NetSuite’s multi-channel Retail Management Suite. The company’s previous point-of-sale solution, Retail Star, mandated an expensive credit card processor and order processing was slow and labor intensive. With NetSuite, multiple Chicago and Pittsburgh inventory locations are now fully integrated with finance, marketing, sales and shipping – with real-time reporting across all of these areas. The flexibility in payment processors has enabled Wrigleyville to negotiate better discount rates, Order and UPS shipping automation has allowed five full-time employees to be reassigned from order processing to customer service. And NetSuite’s scalability is easily handling large spikes in volume, such as after the Steelers’ recent big victory.

“We were initially concerned about the speed of NetSuite, or what would happen if our Internet access went down, but we have put those fears to rest,” said Trey Carlstrom, Co-Owner, Wrigleyville Sports. “We have smoothly processed almost 3,000 transactions in a single day, and a failover switch keeps us connected in case a cable or DSL fails.”

Market Share Inc. (www.sunsetlimousines.com) and (www.getsunsetnow.com), Guilford, CT

Market Share Inc. operates GetWirelessNow, a chain of eight cellular retailers in Connecticut and Rhode Island, as well as Sunset Limousines. Market Share needed to consolidate and analyze customer and accounting data from several cellular phone stores as well as a limousine business, but manual reconciliation of multiple merchant accounts was wasting hours every day, and order and return processing could take upwards of five minutes per transaction. With OnSite and the NetSuite Retail Management Suite, now all of Market Share’s business interests roll up to a single account and reporting mechanism, accessible from anywhere; 600 hours per year of manual accounting integration has been eliminated; order and return processing times have been reduced by 75 percent; and accuracy of transaction amounts has been increased by eliminating the need to key amounts into a credit card terminal.

“Our average sale had been taking five to six minutes but we are now down to a 90-second process,” said Chris Corcoran, President, Market Share Inc. “With the NetSuite Retail Management Suite, our customers are more satisfied, and our employees love it, because they can help the customer faster and move on to the next sale.”

Distribution Video & Audio (www.dva.com), Palm Harbor, FL

Distribution Video & Audio, a 20-year old company, is the country’s largest wholesaler of entertainment closeouts. DVA came on board with NetSuite in 2007. Now with the NetSuite Retail Management Suite, DVA can transform into a point-of-sale system – when DVA opens its doors to the public and its 40 employees change gears and turn their desktop computers into cash registers. Starting at 5 a.m. on those days, DVA employees welcome over 2,000 consumers eager to get their hands on the latest box-office hits that fill pallets and pallets and in their warehouse.

“Our customers may not know the difference, but we know it’s the NetSuite Retail Management Suite – NetSuite combined with OnSite’s point-of-sale integration – that makes those two wonderful but hectic days possible,” said CEO Brad Kugler.

Availability and Pricing

NetSuite Multi-Channel Retail Management Suite is available now. For more information about the new offering please visit http://www.netsuite.com/portal/industries/retail.shtml

For more information about NetSuite, please visit www.netsuite.com.

NOTE: NetSuite and the NetSuite logo are registered service marks of NetSuite Inc.

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SOURCE NetSuite Inc.