Improve E-Retail Business

November 27, 2015 written by
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Last year Snapdeal’ e-commerce platform handled 30 orders per second during the Diwali sale; this year it has handled 300 orders per second in its weekly festive sales. To handle huge traffic, the marketplace player has used a range of forecasting models and analytics tools to predict demand for products and ensure sufficient stocks are available with its sellers when the products goes on sale. It has 1,500 engineers to deal with the huge surge in traffic during sale time.

Snapdeal is among the growing breed of ecommerce players in India that are leveraging technology to address sale-time woes. Flipkart, which had to issue an apology last year for jacked-up prices and product unavailability during the Big Billion Day, was able to run the show successfully this year with a few minor glitches on Day 1 of the second edition of the big-ticket event. Flipkart, compared to last year, the number of customers has more than doubled. There is also a huge increase in our seller numbers. They have ramped up across the board – be it their warehouses, call centres, their delivery mechanism and technology stacks – and this has paid rich dividends. They have definitely done better than 2014.

Unlike last year, the Big Billion Day 2015 was spread over five days and restricted to its mobile app.

Organising such large sales events online requires seamless matching of consumer demand patterns with supply-chain logistics. Before going into big-ticket sale event, e-commerce players must use analytics to understand the typical customer journey from evaluation through consideration and purchase – on different channels (website and mobile app) and then accordingly determine demand patterns across categories.

Amazon, known to use data analytics and technology to manage massive sales events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and more recent Prime Day in the US, has been incorporating its global learning in its India operations.

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The user interface is the only thing that a consumer sees and interacts with. So if your site freezes during the sale or fails to load, the whole idea of organising the event is lost. In July this year, Snapdeal refreshed its user interface, across all platforms: the web, WAP and app.

In addition to increased infrastructure capability and optimised architecture to handle 20X traffic, ShopClues has introduced a new feature ShopClues Connect to initiate chat between customers and sellers, so that customers can negotiate with sellers directly. Snapdeal committed a $300 million investment this year to strengthen its supply chain and logistics.

Snapdeal now has 1.3 million square feet additional warehouse space across 63 fulfilment centres in 25 cities, close to majority seller and buyer locations. Amazon has in the past few months put together a vast delivery network. It expanded the Amazon Logistics footprint three times, opened eight new fulfilment centres (FCs). Today it has 21 FCs operational across 10 states covering a total of over 2 million-square-feet of space with a storage capacity of over 5 million cubic feet. It is working with NGOs in rural India to establish rural distribution centres. For Flipkart, big data analytics is a tool to understand people’s preferences and improve customer engagement. Through the data collected from the various interactions with our customers on the app, we have been able to offer customers various benefits: personalised category recommendations, fashion taste and preferences and location-based recommendations In terms of supply chain support, Flipkart has built a team of 20,000 delivery boys this year compared with 9,000 last year to ensure efficient delivery. Also to prepare its sellers for the sale, it launched Turbo Charge Campaign aimed at enabling small sellers to streamline the back-end processes involved in handling the massive customer demands during this period. Sellers are now given special packages on inventory and enterprise management to handle peak season sales.

As is evident, the big boys of e-commerce are leaving no stone unturned to put in place the best of the technology across all customer touch-points.

 

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