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Hi, I'm Andy Chen, a product manager on the young SAP CX Upscale Commerce (which will be referred to as Upscale) development team at SAP Chengdu Research Institute. CX stands for Customer Experience. Today, I am pleased to be able to give you a preliminary introduction to SAP's new e-commerce cloud platform for the mid-market from the perspective of a product manager.

SAP CX Upscale Commerce is SAP's next-generation mid-market e-commerce SaaS cloud platform designed for retailers, B2C brands, CPG and Direct-to-Consumer industries.

The current target market is the United States (which will gradually be extended to other regions of the world in the future), and the target customers mainly include the following characteristics:

Target company's software procurement and implementation budget is under $250,000

General Business companies with total revenues below $1 billion

Large companies (including SAP Enterprise Commerce Platform and SAP Commerce Cloud customers) are looking to quickly deploy pop-up stores for certain subbrands, small online or in-store app stores. Before choosing Upscale, these companies often choose to deploy on other e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify Plus or Magento.

In October 2018, two SAP leaders, CX President Alex Atzberge and SAP Upscale Commerce Senior Vice President Charles Nicholls, announced the launch of SAP CX Upscale Commerce at CX Live in Barcelona.

In January 2019, SAP Upscale Commerce was selected as one of the best products at SAP Labs China 2018, and I am honored to represent the Chengdu Upscale team to receive this award.

Upscale R & D is located in multiple cities around the world, with Boston focusing on front-end application development and Chengdu, Montreal, Munich and London focusing on back-end microservice delivery.

We begin our product introduction in three chapters, starting with the challenges of digital transformation in the U.S. retail industry, followed by Upscale product concepts and some features, and finally showing how to quickly deploy an iOS mobile native e-commerce app in 30 minutes with Upscale.

If you have any questions about Upscale products and technical architecture, you can leave a message to discuss.

Challenges of Digital Transformation in the Retail Industry (Take the United States as an Example)

1. The improvement of e-commerce mobile user experience is imperative

According to comScore's mobile statistics report, although it accounts for about 70% of the traffic on the entire network, only 20% of transactions occur on the mobile side. The detailed address of this report:

https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2017/Mobiles-Hierarchy-of-Needs

The mainstream online store applications in the market are all designed for PC desktop, while mobile device applications are only extensions and extensions of PC shopping experience. The user experience is not deeply customized for mobile applications, and the experience is poor.

2. Brand is Experience

User experience is increasingly becoming a key element of whether users place orders, and personalized service experience is one of the key factors.

Personalization on a large scale is challenging and difficult: most terminal personalization today is manually configured by merchants. The disadvantages are very obvious-manual workload, poor results, pseudo-personalization, unable to respond to user needs in a timely manner.

3. Channel-less vs Cross Channel

Consumers want to be able to buy the same product from the brand online and offline, and enjoy a highly consistent user experience and service.

Building a robust distributed order management system is a top priority for many brands in order to provide a consistent and good experience for consumers.

4. agility

Brands and retailers need to be able to launch goods quickly to market trial and error. How can new products be brought to market quickly online and offline and respond to changes in market demand?

Building a platform for traditional e-commerce solutions is a daunting task that requires a lot of custom code, takes months (or even longer), and a huge financial expense to implement. Even so, it is sometimes difficult to meet the demands of rapid business deployment and restructuring.

Faced with these challenges, we need a new retail strategy and an e-commerce cloud solution to support this strategy- SAP Upscale!

What are the advantages of SAP Upscale over traditional on-premises e-commerce solutions?

1. Upscale greatly simplifies the digital transformation of traditional e-commerce and opens a new era based on speed and agility. From the creation of a merchant tenant to its launch, it takes only a few days to weeks to configure.

Upscale is tailored for mobile consumers and includes mobile-native iOS, Android apps and PWA apps (Progressive Web App, a new web development technology). Upscale blurs the boundaries between channels, making online or in-store shopping easy and fun.

The AI function embedded in Upscale can automatically help merchants provide personalized services for each user, truly achieving "thousands of people."

By providing a great user experience and personalized, online and offline consistency, merchants will maximize revenue and profits.

image.gif Rapid deployment & flexible response to market dynamics

Upscale is deeply imprinted with retail DNA, and key members of the team have decades of deep knowledge of the retail industry. By combining traditional retail product and Category management experience with deep learning and AI, Upscale blurs the boundaries between three traditionally separate disciplines: merchandising, personalization, and distributed order management. Through real-time recording and analysis of every click, browse, collection and other events on the App, combined with historical sales orders and product data to provide the best shopping experience for each customer, while automatically optimizing sales profits and revenue for each merchant.

Also unlike most traditional business platforms, Upscale is built using the most advanced microservices, and everything is API first. Merchants can flexibly subscribe and deploy front-end applications and back-end services according to their business and digital transformation needs. While gaining flexible and fast market response capabilities, TCO(Total Cost of Ownership) will drop significantly.

The Mobigram

Mobigrams is an AI-based 1-to-1 personalized store app.

Our objectives are:

1. For each end user to provide automated personalized services, truly achieve "thousands of faces";

Automate revenue and profit optimization for each retailer or brand.

Each consumer opens the App with its own unique Mobigram. During the whole process of browsing goods and placing orders, the App will dynamically assemble personalized product collection, category, content and other modules for each user through real-time calculation results of back-end AI. The variables considered by AI real-time calculations include, but are not limited to, the products that retailers want to sell, product inventory location, inventory availability, etc. Use AI and deep learning techniques to balance retailer needs (selling inventory, margins, product turnaround speed and exposure) with customer experiences (access speed, convenience, product relevance, shopping desire) to drive customer experiences that maximize profits for retailers or brands.

Upscale currently has AI features online in three areas:

Continuity Commerce

SAP Upscale Commerce has a built-in AI predictive order continuity engine that automatically identifies customers who are potentially transitioning from a single item purchase to a continuous order.

For example, if a user buys a certain brand of shampoo on a relatively fixed cycle, the system can identify such shopping behavior. Upscale will automatically send invitations to such customers, and users only need to click on the purchase in the invitation, and then they can immediately join the Continuity Program. The merchant will automatically deliver the product to the customer on a regular basis in the future according to the user's preferred cycle).

For the customer, this means that he or she will "never fail to buy" a product he or she likes, or forget to buy something because of negligence. In this process, users naturally become the most loyal members of the brand. For merchants, scientific and accurate prediction of potential purchase demand has effective input, so that further research and automatic inventory management optimization can be realized.

Getting Started with Continuity Ecommerce, Part 1: Approaches, Expectations

https://www.practicalecommerce.com/getting-started-with-continuity-ecommerce-part-1-approaches-expectations

Build SAP Upscale Mobile Native iOS App in 30 Minutes

This section will give you a quick overview of how to build a mobile native iOS app in 30 minutes.

1. ****Upscale tenant*** Subscribe

SAP Upscale provides merchants with a one-click on-boarding tenant tool. You only need to provide the tenant name, subDomain information and the system environment in which the tenant needs to be created, and the background will subscribe the tenant for the user.

Mobile Retail App Configuration

After completing the tenant subscription, merchants can configure their own e-commerce mobile native applications. SAP Upscale Commerce provides a workbench as a configuration interface for merchants. Almost all the work related to building an e-commerce online store can be completed in this interface, among which:

Configuration

This section includes the most basic configuration required for an e-commerce application, such as inventory (warehouse or store), collection, taxation, shipping, user account management, customer service, order management (cancellation, return), etc.

We perform related work such as product, product and category association, inventory initialization information, etc. through background operations. The merchant prepares a CSV file for the product and can configure periodic or one-time jobs to import master data. Upscale provides very flexible field-matching, custom attribute capabilities to help customers complete master data integration.

Another basic configuration is App, where merchants can configure native App(iOS,Android) and PWA applications, and can associate the same or different user experience configurations according to the merchant's policies.

Inventory

As a Channel-less e-commerce solution, online and offline inventory transparency is the foundation. Under this configuration directory, merchants can see global inventory, item inventory and inventory transfer functions.

Edition

Edition is a set of objects, including Category, product, and Trend category automatically recommended by AI. These objects are available for a period of time and on specific channels for consumers to purchase, such as the Fall 2017 Edition. Merchants can flexibly configure multiple Editions and activate one of them according to their own policies, associate it with a channel and then open it to consumers.

Experience

Used to define the layout, modules, and templates of an app. Upscale provides template-based one-click generation function. Merchants only need to generate default experience with one click according to their business needs. What you see is what you get. Then according to the style of your own brand, change the theme such as color, logo, etc., you can associate edition to build a native app.

3. Omnichannel User Experience

After completing the above configuration, merchants can deploy the App to the app store for users or stores to use. An omnichannel user experience enables customers to shop anywhere and truly get an omnichannel personalized experience.

Below is a screenshot of an iPhone app simulated by Xcode:

We can see that each customer has its own customized personalized interface, the system will dynamically remove the content and products that customers do not like, change the content and method of product promotion, and guide customers into the categories that are most relevant to themselves and the easiest to place orders.

While users get the best experience, Upscale also maximizes retailers 'revenue and profits.

Upscale supports the following platforms:

Mobile App - iOS & Android

Mobile Web (PWA)

Tablet (PWA)

Desktop (PWA)

Kiosk & In Store

Through this basic introduction to SAP Upscale Commerce, I believe you should have a preliminary understanding of this new SaaS e-commerce cloud solution from SAP. Limited space, if there are any questions and more interest, welcome to discuss, thanks for reading.

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