Siebel eSales Overview

This chapter provides an overview of Oracle’s Siebel eSales and the Siebel eSales Web site. It contains the following sections:

About Siebel eSales

Siebel eSales allows your company to do business-to-business and business-to-consumer sales over the Web. It offers:

Hierarchical multimedia product catalogs
Product search
User-specified product comparison
Distributed catalog administration, allowing multiple-vendor catalogs
Customer profiling and personalization, using Siebel Personalization
Customizable order management processes, using Siebel Business Process Designer
Online Shopping Carts, quotes, and orders, which include:
- Order approval processes
- Streamlined checkout processes
- Integration with third-party taxation, credit checking, and payment processing applications
- Integration with third-party fulfillment engines

The following optional modules:
- Siebel Configurator for Web-based product configuration
- Siebel Pricer for one-to-one pricing and promotions using custom price lists
- Eligibility for determining whether customers are eligible to purchase products.
- Compatibility for defining global rules to determine which products are compatible.
- Product promotions to create promotions that appear in the catalog.
- Recommendations for defining rules to upsell and cross-sell products.

The Siebel eSales Web Site

The home page gives customers an overview of the Web site and displays both the accessible catalogs and recommended products. Registered users can also access their account information.

The Web site uses the templates provided with Siebel customer applications. You could use these templates for creating portal pages to which you can add text, as well as links to HTML pages and documents. Portal pages can display marketing collateral, news articles, group news, financial information, press releases, and other kinds of unstructured content.

For information on customizing Web pages, see Using Siebel Tools.

Customers link to other pages by clicking tabs or hyperlinks on the home page. The following pages display more detailed information:

Catalogs. This page provides access to the products and services on your company’s Siebel eSales Web site.
Shopping Cart. The Shopping Cart stores the products and services selected by customers. Each line item in the Shopping Cart displays the item’s reference price and the customer’s personalized price.
My Account. The My Account page allows end users to update their user profiles, as well as view their saved quotes, saved orders, and registered products.
By registering and tracking their products, end users can receive product news or alerts, track warranty agreements, receive recommendations on scheduled services, and submit and track service requests related to their products.
Through the My Account page, end users can check their outstanding order status and reorder items.
Registered users with delegated customer administration privileges can add other users and edit user profiles. Delegated customer administrators can set the roles of other users within their accounts. The role indicates whether a registered user has both purchasing and administrative responsibilities.
All quotes and orders for a user are visible to that user on the My Account page, including those created in Siebel Sales and Siebel Call Center.

Note: If you do not want a user to be able to order a particular item from his or her favorites list or templates, you must delete the item from the appropriate price list or make it inactive. Removing the item from the catalog will not prevent the user from ordering that item.
If your company also has a license for Siebel Orders, depending on your configuration, you can automatically create asset records. If your company has also purchased Siebel eCustomer or Siebel Self Service, this does not prevent end users from registering products that they did not buy from your company. For more information about registered products, see Siebel Self Service Administration Guide.