Oracle CX Marketing (formerly Oracle Marketing Cloud) is a solution designed to enable marketers to plan and execute automated marketing campaigns via email, display search, video advertising, and mobile while delivering a personalized customer experience for their prospects.
$2,000
per month
ShopKeep
Score7 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ShopKeep is an iPad point of sale system; The vendor says it is intuitive, secure, affordable software that helps merchants run smarter businesses. The product optimizes staffing and inventory, while offering sales reports and customer information on a cloud-based platform. The product includes low-cost, integrated payment processing, as well as point of sale hardware. According to the vendor, ShopKeep has 23,000 customers, and a customer…
A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities. Less favorable for the people who want to have something at a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing much in detail.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
ShopKeep can maintain up to 10,000 individual stock items. This is perfect for a cafe, coffee shop, wine bar, small retail store, etc. If you're inventory exceeds the 10,000 items then it may not be a fit for you. Also, ShopKeep works with Apple tablets only (iPad 2 or later). If you prefer Android or PC based tablets then this won't work for you.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
ShopKeep provides solid pre-sales support. They did a pre-sales screen-share demo that helped us ensure that their system would handle the needs of the business, and they assisted us in making decisions around which hardware would be appropriate.
ShopKeep's hardware seems well thought out and well integrated. One exception is issues with the connection between their recommended iCMP credit card scanner and the register. Other than that, the hardware works well together.
The register has excellent configurability and customization capabilities, and handles a large variety of products easily. High-volume products can have their own buttons on the register. Products can be added to a purchase by using these buttons, by scanning a bar code with an integrated bar code scanner, or by doing a live text search.
The register is also easily configurable to handle product options - either multiple options like pizza toppings, or exclusive options like regular or decaf coffee.
The ShopKeep system can handle hybrid retail/quick serve/restaurant scenarios with grace. This was a factor that eliminated many other systems that are optimized for one or the other, or where the products for handling retail are completely separate from the products for handling quick serve/restaurant operations. Since this customer has a location where there is a quick serve counter, a restaurant, and a retail gift shop all in the same location, ShopKeep's ability to handle all of these kinds of transactions from the same platform is a powerful advantage. ShopKeep also recently added functionality to transfer open tickets between registers, so that if a customer starts out with a cup of coffee at the quick serve counter, their ticket can be picked up and added to at the gift shop if they wander in there to purchase items.
ShopKeep has a Back Office system that can be accessed through any Web browser, or through their mobile app. The Back Office system is used to import and export data, manage inventory, configure the iPad registers, set up product options, manage employees, and report transactions, sales, product costs & margins, and other data.
Discounts, returns and credits are relatively easy to handle from the register, and the system can be configured to require a manager to approve these kinds of transactions, or not.
Bulk imports and exports are handled well by ShopKeep's Back Office. When setting up initial inventory, products can be added through Excel, then imported as comma-separated values (CSV) files by uploading them through the Web browser. Once inventory is established, adding or modifying items can be done directly through the Web interface.
ShopKeep has a mobile app that can be used by owners or managers to remotely access real-time snapshots of sales and other important data whenever they wish.
Integration options outside of auto-syncs. I am currently having an issue trying to find an adapter to use with Eloqua to API into our data warehouse but keep the functionality on the Eloqua side.
To provide more transparency and visual details of the syncs (integrations of outside data) from any other system that is feeding Eloqua, like what is being updated or changed, better explanations of errors, drill down to newly created records.
Custom Objects - Need to have a way to create CDOs outside of just form submissions and uploading of lists, like if you needed to import a file nightly to feed that CDO data but automate the import and make sure it maps to a contact record.
Import of data from a file on SFTP - There is no way to filter or create logic to control what is being fed into Eloqua. Currently, that manipulation has to be done by the IT side first. Less flexibility.
Better auditing capabilities within the canvas. meaning, sometimes if something is changed or not working the problem may not necessarily show up in immediately, the pattern could take a while to present itself. For example, the feeders into the program. If there is a problem, I don't know that maybe contacts are not entering the program until we do reporting that month and realize there was a lull of contacts going through. Then we have a whole month of missed records or other potential data issues. When you get do large and your Eloqua machine is very robust, the harder it is to see everything
Be able to add more than 250 custom contact records. That definitely inhibits my organization in how we need to use that record.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.
Because we expect the current issue with the credit card reader disconnecting from the register to be solved with an upcoming software update, and we like many of the features of Shopkeep.
Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.
The register functionality is excellent, both from a learning standpoint and an operations standpoint. Cashiers learn how to use the register quickly, and the registers can be configured with hot buttons for fast-moving products. Setting up product variations and additions is straightforward. The web-accessible Back Office has good features, but lacks enough granularity to provide a store manager with the ability to modify inventory settings without giving them access to all of the financial reports as well.
There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.
We found that we often were telling support people how the system worked. Because we were on E9 that created a lot of support issues as well since few people on the support team seemed to know how E9 worked. That was mostly okay except when we had major system issues (like SSO preventing us from logging in after an update), it became really hard to get answers that weren't vague. It was always the issues that had the highest visibility within the organization (like with Sales) that seemed to take forever to resolve and didn't have a clear escalation path. When Oracle switched Eloqua over to the Oracle support portal it just got worse
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Occasional long waits [5 minutes or more] or call-backs needed for telephone support. Email support replies usually take several hours. Support personnel are generally friendly and knowledgable.
They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification.
After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”
Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout
I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.
If moving from a "dumb" cash register system, spend all the time needed to get starting inventory and product costing and pricing correct. Shopkeep has good tools for reporting inventory, margins, and other critical business info, but the information is only useful if the starting figures are accurate.
It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch to something else better than Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
ShopKeep is an inexpensive choice iPad POS system that comes with all of the tools needed to do business without any long-term contracts or expensive fees. It also offers free 24/7 phone and email support along with online live chat during business hours. Coffee Shop Manager offered some of these items, but they also tied you into a long-term contract and you were charged fee after fee for support, etc. Also, the CSM system was big and took up a lot of space compared to ShopKeep's integration with an Apple iPad tablet.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We are able to use it to help our clients scale through testing
We have been able to measure the impact of our events and sales events so we can determine which events to continue in the future and determine future investment
Launch a new brand out of Eloqua and measure awareness
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
ShopKeep didn't integrate with my accounting software. I had to double enter all financial data.
Without inventory controls, all of my financial information was inaccurate. It is impossible to grow a business without accurate financial information.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
