Zoho Challenges The Commerce Industry Status Quo with New Omni-Channel Platform 

Zoho announced today its new, comprehensive commerce platform, Commerce Plus. Built on top of Zoho One, the operating system for business, Commerce Plus is a fully integrated, end-to-end platform for the commerce vertical. From sales to fulfillment to customer loyalty, Commerce Plus leverages Zoho’s customer experience, finance, analytics, and intelligence software to provide businesses an interconnected, first-of-its-kind commerce experience platform.

“Businesses today are forced to navigate the technology jungle to figure out the right applications needed to run their operations-this is no different, and can be even more challenging, in commerce,” said Gibu Mathew, Vice President, and GM, Asia Pacific, Zoho Corp. . “With Commerce Plus, we offer one platform to run an entire commerce business, allowing businesses to focus on what is important for success. Built on Zoho One, Commerce Plus is the operating system for commerce.”

“The digital commerce landscape is extremely competitive. For organizations looking to successfully sell online, constant innovation and a superior customer experience are pre-requisites to success,” said Jordan Jewell, Research Manager, Digital Commerce and Enterprise Applications at IDC. “Zoho’s new CommercePlus product offers a unique approach to Commerce as it offers native integrations with both front- and back-office applications, better-equipping customers to achieve omni-channel commerce operations. The company’s international customer base also bodes well for Zoho CommercePlus, since emerging markets will become the largest sources of growth over the next 5 years.”

Comprehensive E-commerce Platform

• For businesses looking to set up an online store, Commerce Plus offers quick and easy ways to construct an online presence. By offering built-in templates, the platform allows users to quickly digitize their commerce business with minimal effort.
• Commerce Plus allows users to sell across channels. Businesses can sell online through their own e-commerce store, third-party marketplaces, brick-and-mortar storefronts, or other channels.
• The Commerce Plus platform helps businesses maintain a single inventory of items sold across multiple channels. Whether a business sells though its online store or third-party marketplaces like Amazon, Ebay, or Etsy, Commerce Plus offers a unified inventory system.

Personalized Commerce Experience

• The best commerce experience is one that is personalized for each visitor. The Commerce Plus platform is integrated with Zoho’s Customer Experience platform, enabling businesses to offer a personalized experience to every visitor by combining information across customer touch points. For example, Commerce Plus can tailor the commerce experience based on whether a visitor is new, returning, or high-valued.
• With each visitor/customer taking a different path, Commerce Plus enables businesses to build customized journeys based on the customer’s stage in the process. For example, Commerce Plus has built-in journeys for visitors with abandoned carts. Journeys can be created and personalized based on additional information available across the platform and deployed to provide a personalized experience.
• Omni-channel customer communication-available as part of our customer experience platform-is inherited by Commerce Plus, enabling context-aware dialogue with prospects and customers. With customer information seamlessly flowing across multiple communication channels-email, chat, phone, and more-marketing, sales, and support representatives have a unified view and context of each customer and can deliver a consistent, cohesive experience.

Efficient Back-End Operations

• With Commerce Plus, the customer experience doesn’t end when an order has been placed. Order management, fulfillment tools, shipping, labels, notifications, inventory management, warehouse management, and more are included out-of-the-box with the Commerce Plus platform.
• Commerce Plus is integrated with more than 40 global shipping providers, enabling businesses to create shipping labels directly from the software. Items can be shipped from either a single location or multiple warehouses, making the process seamless.
• All sales orders, purchases, expenses, and other transactions, including deposits to business bank accounts, are integrated with Zoho’s world-class accounting system. This is a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive integration between an accounting system and a commerce system.

Powerful Analytics for Commerce

• Zoho Analytics, one of the most comprehensive analytics platforms on the market, offers several pre-built dashboards and reports for Commerce Plus. These built-in reports and dashboards span e-commerce, operations, and more, offering numerous insights out of the box.
• Several reports in Commerce Plus offer visibility into visitor behavior on any e-commerce store, including heat maps, scroll maps, and more. Reports also provide insights into conversions for every product sold on the e-commerce store. For example, conversion percentages for adding an item to a cart to a successful checkout is tracked for every product, region, and more, offering insights into conversions based on various parameters.
• Data from any third-party system can be imported into Zoho Analytics and analyzed alongside data from Commerce Plus, providing blended insights.

Intelligence & AI

• Commerce Plus inherits all the AI capabilities from Zoho One. Intelligence from sales, marketing, support, and other Zohos apps is combined with commerce data, offering intelligent insights to the user. Zia, Ask Zia, Zia Voice, and Zia Search are all available throughout the platform.
• For example, users can ask Zia, “What are my most popular items in Canada?” and Zia can dramatically create reports pertaining to that request. Users can then automate their commerce sites to promote the most popular items on the homepage specified by region.
• AI is a key factor in Commerce Plus’ fraud detection. By cross-referencing IP address information available from other Zoho and third-party systems, Zia will notify businesses of suspicious or fraudulent activity from a particular customer.

Third-Party Integration & Extendability

• Zoho understands that businesses use multiple third-party applications. Through Zoho Flow, the company’s integration platform, Commerce Plus enables seamless integration with third-party systems. Zoho Flow is pre-integrated with more than 200 applications. Businesses can hook Commerce Plus into any third-party system and during any transaction. For example, if a business wants to push customer data or order data into a third-party system whenever an order is placed, it can be done with the platform.
• Commerce Plus inherits extensibility from individual Zoho applications, making Commerce Plus customizable and extendable to the needs of any growing business.

Setup and More

• Zoho will be launching Concierge, a jumpstart service, that allows businesses to set up and configure a commerce business for a flat fee of $1,000.
• Zoho is launching its own store on the Commerce Plus platform, where customers can purchase Zoho merchandise.

Pricing and Availability

Commerce Plus can be licensed either as an entire platform or specifically for creating an online store. Pricing starts at $20/month to get started with e-commerce. To license the entire Commerce Plus platform, it is $100/month plus $30/employee or $75/user. Additional details are available here.