Over the past few years ecommerce has grown at almost four times the rate of retail sales and is now worth more than USD 4.3 trillion. It is forecasted to cross USD 6.5 trillion by 2023. This is bigger than the GDP of world’s 3rd largest economy! And if we were to include USD 21 plus trillion of current B2B sales to it, opportunities in ecommerce look even more pronounced.

Similar story is playing out in India as well. Riding on exponential growth in internet and online infrastructure, the ecommerce sector is going through a rapid growth. As per analysts, ecommerce in India is on its way to become a USD 100 billion industry by 2024, up from USD 30 billion clocked in 2019, signifying a CAGR of 27%. This is expected to reach USD 200 billion by 2027.

To the world it is evident that technology is the driver of this revolution. But so far the role of technology in ecommerce has been focused on building a great customer experience which is outward centric. It has not focused much on aspects that are inward centric, that help achieve significant breakthrough in bringing operational efficiencies of the organization. Some of the internal technical challenges or problem statements that an application can focus and help bring scalability to the entire operations are enumerated below:

• Identifying which of the customer acquisitions channels are working best for the highest conversion of customers and also which of the customer acquisition channels are leading to higher lifetime value (LTV) customers.
• Linking of customer orders to procurement orders so that the inventory held internally is optimized without affecting the customer experience (stocks outs and delays).
• Building strong collaboration and synchronization in the work tasks that cut across multiple teams viz. warehouse, shipping and delivery.
• Tracking and reporting operations metrics of various teams to identify and fix the bottlenecks in fulfillment operations.
• Implementing an automated program for driving supplier performance based on customer feedback, lead time, shipping time, pricing, product quality and returns policy.
• Identifying the inherent risks for customer orders, customer, seller listings (if applicable), sellers (if applicable) and routing them through the appropriate risk mitigation workflows.
• Driving all the promotions and deals by creating a yearly promotional calendar using a promotion platform which will help bring synchronization between procurement, delivery and customer orders.
• Ensuring continuously that pricing of the product on the platform is not off the track of the pricing of the product on the competitor’s platform. This requires collecting product pricing from customer by using round about mechanism such as crawling and data extraction for price.
• If customer order has multiple orders, then through a workflow breaking that order into multiple line items so that each of it can go through its own cycle of procurement and fulfillment.
• Being able to link customer payment and order to the vendor and seller payment with detailed audit trail through a workflow system so that the financial reconciliation can happen in a streamlined manner without much manual intervention.
• Monitoring, tracking and analyzing cart behavior of customers and also the purchase behavior to decide a personalized incentivization scheme for various customers.
• Monitoring, tracking and analyzing the purchase behavior of customers to send personalized and gamified messages to the customer.

Achieving the above requires that the technology platform powering the ecommerce operation is modeled around the central principles of an ecommerce business (instead of being put together in an adhoc and functional manner), is capable of managing and extracting data in a very natural way, decomposing the application into units of manageable complexity, enabling making changes faster and without much churn.

At IOO Labs we follow Rapid Application Development process leveraging our in-house low code development platform to deliver timely solutions to our clients.

Please get in touch with us to find out more.