Bringing Your IT Vision To Reality
eCommerce Business Intelligence Case Study Increasing eCommerce sales through improved customer experience and innovative E-commerce Retail Business Intelligence
Industry Consumer Goods Retail
Customer A large Global Multi Channel Retailer
Solution eCommerce Solution and Retail Business Intelligence
The rapidly growing eCommerce retail industry is fiercely competitive and demands businesses to stay on the cutting edge of technology to keep up with volatile sales trends and yet maintain highest quality customer experience. In such a business climate, customer experience, insight into customer behavior, customer feedback, combined with market Intelligence is a critical success factor for any large business in this cutthroat industry.
Visionet’s client, a multi-billion ($) global retail leader knew it had to stay head of its competition through retaining customer loyalty. Visionet eCommerce expert team helped dramatically enhance customer’s eCommerce platform and associated business intelligence capability, resulting in higher sales, customer traction and enabled merchandizers to sell the right product, at the right time through optimal utilization of eCommerce platform.
SCM and eCommerce Solutions
Business & Social Intelligence need in eCommerce
Business Need
The e-commerce scenario has evolved great deal in recent years. The influx of social networking, reviews into the e-commerce websites has given ways to smarter purchasing decisions by customers. It also provides eCommerce vendors the opportunity to quantitatively leverage the social experiences. ECommerce websites can observe, learn, adopt and gain from the user behavior through social intelligence which sits at the heart of the modern day e-commerce enterprises.
The client wanted to provide its customers the ability to reviews and rate products based on their recent purchases, display aggregate product rating, allow users to ask question and integrate its e-commerce website with CoreMetrics for recording website traffic, entry point statistics, record navigation patterns, sales checkouts and visitor statistics. This information was important to see aggregate user behavior trends since it facilitate end user sentiment understanding, special offers, marketing campaigns and pricing strategies alignment. Customer also needed to gauge search engine performance and search result relevance as it bears direct impact on the customer traffic retention rates.
The Client
Visionet’s Involvement
A global retailer needed an improved eCommerce site, integration and analysis platform for its e-commerce website marketing, sales and customer behavior analysis. The company deals in millions of items across product categories ranging from jewelry to electronics and from kitchen to household accessories. The company deals in product lines for men, women and children of all ages. The company has regional presence across Europe and North America. The company also runs retail stores in parallel to e-commerce business. The company has strong presence and comprehensively facilitates handheld devices for the customer base.
Visionet Systems with decades of experience in high quality and vertical IT services in retail, supply/ demand management and Business Intelligence solutions was engaged by the customer to help meet the challenge. Visionet team integrated CoreMetrics data points with offline sales and projected sales as well as carried out the integration of eCommerce platform with other 3rd party social interaction/search services (like Bazaar Voice, Endeca) and related Text Mining solution. The statistical measurements over this abridgement were published to customized dashboards targeted at specific business stake holders need. It was a major leap as the successful implementation of these major enhancements would enable retailer gain significant customer insights for optimally leveraging the limited space available on key areas of the web site.
VISIONET APPROACH
BENEFITS & RESULTS
Visionet assigned its team of analysts with the company to take full grasp of the business situation and the overall IT scenario where this solution would fit into. Based on this analysis, VSI global team of Business Intelligence experts came up with integration and implementation model, along-with the dimensional model for data warehouse which would sit behind the proposed solution. The functional and technical solution designs were regressively reviewed with all stake holders in IT and business before moving on to implementation. Visionet analysts and development teams worked hand in hand with the company staff to come up with custom dashboards serving the business need.
Visionet’s solution enabled marketing staff analyze the performance of marketing channels and quantitative attribution of e-commerce sales and traffic to specific marketing campaigns. Dashboards also facilitated the merchandising and retail staff in analyzing the e-commerce sales, product category performance and insight into the user community. The solution also provided quantitative analysis of social interactions of the website and linked it with marketing channel and product categories. Company staff could compare current year statistics with last year or compare year-on-year ratios. The solution also enables filtering and sorting data across multiple dimensions on the dashboards as well as on date ranges.
THE CONSTRUCTION First step in the implementation of the solution was 3rd party components integration; Visionet started off by integrating CoreMetrics and Bazaar Voice products Ask & Answer, Stories, Ratings & Review. Visionet also integrated Endeca search system and address standardization components. Data Warehouse was built to capture and retain the information extracted from all these components as well as from the back office Retail systems. Visionet created OLAP cube containing the facts and dimensions and built custom dashboards for tactical as well as trend analysis.
TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES Visionet provided services for 3rd party components integration in the tool & technologies already being used for the e-commerce website thus eliminating any extra licensing and maintenance costs. It also ensured that this new solution fits within existing IT infrastructure smoothly. Visionet team built the data warehouse, cube and dashboards solution using Microstrategy (for OLAP services and analytical dashboards), Oracle 10g (for data management) and Informatica (for extraction/ transformation and loading data from disparate resources. Retail Sales Data eCommerce Site Statistics
Retail Sales
CoreMetrics Extract
E-Commerce Site
Core Metrics
VSI Web Analytics
Visionet’s Business Intelligence Solutions For over ten years Visionet Systems has been helping companies mitigate risk and prepare to make the most of their corporate data. From enterprise data management assessment to establishing rigorous data standards, our domain and technology expertise has assisted companies in defining their corporate data strategies and getting the very most out of their BI and reporting assets. Over the years Visionet Systems has engineered high performing and cost effective solutions for its customers, while building deep competencies in the IT Industry. We are a global services and solutions enterprise serving the strategic vision of our customers with industry segment services and solutions, and software modernization services which increase our customer's business agility, drive down their costs, and reduce risk. We are focused on expansion, growth, and prosperity while exceeding customer expectations and enriching our employees.
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Bringing Your IT Vision To Reality
Visionet Systems Inc. East Coast Office: 3 Cedar Brook Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512
Phone: 609 409 1063 x 1116 Fax: 609 655 5232 CJohnson@visionetsystems.com http://www.visionetsystems.com