Q3 helps client to market their product, monitors sales performance, conducts market analysis and provides backend support through SQL interface.
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.
Business Situation
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 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.
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:
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 related 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
Faced with the need for more resources, we were initially hesitant about how it would work to outsource some development work. Q3 has been an ideal partner; we now think of them as an extension of our development team, and appreciate all their efforts to learn about our people and our products. They have been excellent at seeking clarification on design questions, and have increased the knowledge and depth of their team in response to our needs. We particularly appreciated their willingness to document their work using our internal systems, saving us administration time. We would not hesitate to recommend Q3 to anyone seeking a reliable, knowledgeable and conscientious development partner.