Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

Client has an online shopping portal with the world’s biggest selection of books. It carries over 1.5 million titles. In order to sell the 1.5 million titles, client has created various "online storefronts" on websites such as Amazon.com, Ebay.com and Abebooks.com. These websites have an enormous client base which allows smaller, reputable businesses exposure to more buyers and gain overall exposure in the online shopping segment, while providing their own customer’s the opportunity to shop around the best price.

Business Situation

The client’s business deals with a large repository of books, customer accounts, seller accounts and the transaction details of each of the orders placed. All this combines to form a huge database.

The Database requires the following functionalities to be conducted on a routine basis:

• Maintenance and enhancement of the database
• Adding up of new business rules, creation and modification of procedures.
• Monitoring of exception handling of Oracle errors.

The database is being maintained on Oracle and the business requirement is for a constant involvement in backend operations. Also for the different departments of the client, various reports are required like accounting reports, marketing reports, sales reports etc.

The online book business is highly competitive and requires constant thrust on identifying best sellers, non sellers, dead stock, slow moving inventory etc. Many critical procedures are required to fetch the above mentioned information from the database.

Apart from the US marketplace, the client also launched an Indian prototype of the marketplace. In that new project the database was populated with all the initially available information; some of the information was incomplete and required cleaning up in order to provide complete information details. This was important to give rise to a comprehensive and complete catalogue for the Indian marketplace.

Solution

Q3 Technology became a partner and provided effective solutions to all the above mentioned business requirements of the client. Q3 takes care of the client’s database and performs other database development activities. The team at Q3 works closely with client’s workforce and creates Oracle reports and fetches desired data from the database.

Q3 creates reports for the marketing, accounting and sales functions of the client company. Based on the marketing reports, the marketing team of the client sends out promotional emails, festival bonanza etc. These reports are also used by the client to monitor overall sales performance and adjust the pricing structure accordingly.

Procedures and functions have been created to take out best selling ISBNs, identifying dead inventory, order cascading etc.

Q3 also handles the customer support function of the client. Numerous shell scripts have been created for the customer support team enabling them to gather information from the database using different criteria’s like order number, email address, shipping address etc.

Also, promotional emails are regularly sent to customers and site visitors. The client required a PL/SQL functionality that strikes the customers off from the promotional mailing list, if the customer so desires. All such development tasks are undertaken at Q3 diligently.

For client’s India marketplace, Q3 continues to create numerous Oracle reports and scripts to help them analyze and market their product.

Benefits

• Cost effective solutions to database management as per client’s requirement.
• Oracle reports are being created for all functions/departments of the client company.
• 24X7 monitoring of oracle performance and exceptions.
• PL/SQL transactions, SQL reports and Shell scripts are created to achieve the desired results accurately.
• Backend control of partner accounts, vendor accounts managed through SQL interface.
• Complete ownership of the process and innovative techniques to achieve optimum results