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Q3 independently manages complete operations of client's online Marketplace

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 is one of the world’s largest online trader of books for more than a decade. Client has a website for online shopping comprising a wide selection of books. Established in 1995, it has over 1.5 million titles. In order to market these titles, the client created various “online storefronts” on websites such as Amazon.com, Ebay.com and Abebooks.com. These websites have an enormous Client base which provides smaller, reputable businesses with exposure to a wide market to sell their items, while providing their own customer’s the opportunity to shop around the best price.

Business Situation

A1Marketplace was developed by the client as a solution to the problems encountered for over past 10 years of selling on various marketplaces. Client pledged to resolve the problems they faced as marketplace sellers and designed a sound seller friendly platform which would allow sellers to upload, maintain and sell their books through Client.com. The client also took extra steps in simplifying marketplace integration and addressing user issues.

Existing marketplaces lacked the focus on their sellers. Such marketplaces had forgotten that to succeed, they should focus on both the buyer and the seller. Far too often, sellers were barely making a profit after succumbing to the demands, rules and commissions of a marketplace.

The Client Marketplace was launched with a focus on medium/large-sized sellers – sellers that carry a few to hundreds of thousands of books. Client Marketplace was designed in such a way as to accommodate the sellers profitably in order to provide a better service for the marketplace customer base.

Solution

Q3 technologies handles customer-care services for the client. Q3 manages different mail accounts for addressing the queries of both the sellers and customers.

These operations can be broadly categorized into the following:

• Emails/Customer Care
  • Seller Customer Service
    • Help with Uploads
    • Send out the FTP information with instructions to upload
    • Send out instructions to Update inventory
    • Send out instructions to delete inventory
    • Send out instructions to Update Order Status
  • Buyer Customer Service:
    • Investigate the issue, provide proof to fight for Chargeback
    • Contacting Sellers when not responding to buyer emails
• Monitoring
  • Accounts- logged in last, seller agreement accepted, is cc info on file
  • Reports- To verify when the updates were modified or deletes were sent
  • Sales- to monitor the volume and type of sales, and number of orders in the pipeline
  • Inventory- to know the status of inventory and related attributes.
  • FTP accounts- create them, send instructions and monitor uploads through FTP
  • Order Status- fulfilled ratio, refund ratio, orders in Placed order?
  • Book Approval
  • Refunds- Analyze why the number of refunds is high and the reasons for refund.
  • Voicemail- check and attend to it
• Create and Update
  • Update the email, nick name, address, credit card information of Sellers
  • Run reports/queries to find out more about Sellers, Orders, Sales, PNL etc.
  • Create FTP accounts for Book Router, Fillz, Booktrakker, The Art of Books and other clients
  • Communicate with potential Sellers
• Payments
  • Sending out emails to Sellers for Order Updates before payments
  • Charging Credit Cards as part of Return Refunds/ Charge Backs
  • Payments to Sellers through Paypal

Benefits

• Q3’s Support enabled the client to grow his business. Exploring new avenues for growth client also launched a Marketplace for Indian Market.
• Support was cost effective and enhanced the profit of the client.