Retailers face intense competition in a high volume, low margin environment. To succeed, retailers must be able to increase operating efficiencies and improve sales by personalizing the customer experience, improving sales associate productivity, and using multiple sales channels to service customers. In addition, retailers must be able to control expenses by minimizing fraud and cost-effectively implementing new systems such as Point of Sale, Just In Time inventory management, and merchandising. In turn, business managers must be able to make real-time decisions based on real-time data.

MySQL helps retailers harness the tremendous amounts of data generated from billions of transactions, millions of customers, and thousands of suppliers. By converting this information into actionable information, retailers can increase revenues and decrease costs. Powells Books and Omaha Steaks are among the growing number of retail organizations that have deployed innovative retail systems that rely on MySQL and benefited from increased revenues and lower operating expenses.

MySQL has the following capabilities that make it an ideal database for retail applications:

• High Performance, enabling retail applications to capture extremely high volumes of data. This gives retailers the ability to do more granular analysis, and the ability to handle heavier data loads as the number of their products and customers grows over time.
• Reduced COGS and Improved Profitability by using a highly cost efficient database that allows vendors to offer retail applications at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. MySQL's lower costs provide margin flexibility, so pricing can be more easily set to appeal to price-sensitive small and mid-sized retail outlets.
• Ease of Installation, Configuration and Use so retailers can get a complete solution up and running quickly using an out-of-the box configuration.
• Zero Administration, removing the need for retailers to hire in high-cost database administration skills to maintain the database. Smaller retail establishments often can't afford to hire a dedicated IT Manager let alone a DBA.
• High Reliability so all customer, product, pricing and sales data is captured and managed, 24x7.

White Papers

• White Paper: Guide to Choosing an Embedded Database
• White Paper: "A Visual Guide to Installing MySQL in Windows Applications"
• White Paper: Top 10 Reasons to Choose MySQL for Online Retail

Webinars

• Scaling to 200K Transactions per Second with Open Source - MySQL, Java, curl, PHP  
• For ISVs and OEMs: Getting Started Using MySQL in Windows Applications

Other Resources

• Why Product Managers Choose MySQL (ISV)
• Why Engineering VPs Choose MySQL (ISV)
• MySQL as an Embedded Database
• ISV / OEM Customers
• ISV / OEM Resources