Clients

Case Studies

Ecommerce

Client:
Retail and Online Coffee Vendor

Challenge:
In addition to sales through its company-operated retail stores, the vendor sells primarily whole bean coffees through franchised specialty stores and cafes as well as online to consumers. The company wanted to improve the marketing and analytics of its online consumer business as well as provide online ordering to its franchisees – something not available at all.

Unable to handle increasing off-line order volume, the existing fulfillment system often took days rather than hours. The company also realized that the experience expected and required by business customers was fundamentally different from consumer-based interactions. Selling to business customers requires customer-facing systems capable of recognizing who the customer is, and then delivering a personalized and relevant sales experience.

Solution:
Working with technology partner Atidan, the company rebuilt its business-to-consumer portal using Microsoft Commerce Server. Commerce Server is an extensible solution that enabled the customer to also rapidly launch its business-to-business e-commerce portal and integrate with its existing mainframe fulfillment system. With the new solution they could now build virtual catalogs with special promotional pricing for different groups of customer. Marketing could now target ads or discounts to users of a specific profile For example, target ads to female users who visit the site three times a week, and who have purchased three or more products.

Most importantly the company could now deliver business customers a highly relevant self-service ecommerce experience, including targeted products, promotions and pricing. The company chose Atidan because of its strengths in project management, and together both companies worked through four phases: solution pre-analysis, design, implementation, and testing. The new online shop was established within a very short timeframe, and the company met its go-live date with all the desired functionality.

Benefits:

The new business-to-consumer portal generated immediate benefits in improved revenue, increased customer satisfaction and retention, and reduced operating costs.
Instead of manually entering product orders for franchisees, it is possible to use Web services with Commerce Server to automatically update the fulfillment system, virtually eliminating manual errors.
Commerce Server reports enable increased visibility into site effectiveness for sales operations.