PROCESSING E-COMMERCE ORDERS ACROSS MULTIPLE MARKETPLACES
Overview
Chilli Furniture were hitting bottlenecks in their fulfilment process
Chilli Furniture are a medium sized business that sell a wide range of stock across multiple marketplaces online. They were continually hitting a bottleneck in their fulfilment process, particularly during spikes in order volumes.
They came to Heracon in need of a solution to automate their order processes across various marketplaces including, B&Q, The Range, Shopfiy and Amazon. They were in search of a solution that automatically aggregated all orders across all platforms and imported order information into their own database ready to be fulfilled by their warehouse team.
Services
Application Development
Challenges
The final product must work with their existing systems (Microsoft Access).
All marketplaces used by the company must be part of the aggregation process.
The solution had to remain agnostic to integrating with new marketplaces in the future.
The solution must work locally and encrypt data in transit to ensure that sensitive customer data is protected.
Off the shelf products do not work due to the use of a niche internal order processing system.
Outcomes
A standalone application was built that interfaces with the companies internal system (Microsoft Access), inserting and updating order information. (VB could not be used due to security concerns).
The application interacts with and aggregates order information from all of the companies marketplaces and processes them into the internal system automatically.
The process runs every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ensuring that internal systems closely reflect information held on the marketplaces.
An estimated 2 person days are saved every week, by avoiding repetitive and tedious manual data synchronisation.
“Heracon’s ability to find a solution to our problem has been exceptional. We now no longer waste countless hours manually processing orders.”
Discovery and Prototyping
01
Our engagement with Chilli Furniture began with a collaborative discussion aimed at ideating the best possible solution to the problem, focussing on what would and wouldn’t work for them.
Once an initial plan was in place, we quickly realised that due to legacy compatibility issues, building the solution using the existing tech stack would not work due to security concerns (visual basic). Instead a new approach was taken to build a side car application, that works alongside the existing systems to process the orders.
The application has been designed to be able to support the addition of new marketplaces in the future, such that if Chilli Furniture decide to start selling with a new site e.g. eBay, then the application can be easily extended and updated to support the new vendor.
Once the end to end order processing was working on the test bench for a single marketplace, we then worked closely with the team at Chilli to ensure that orders were being processed correctly and securely before expanding the integration to the remaining marketplaces.
Development
02
With a bespoke project such as this, we always knew that rolling out the end product would have it’s challenges. This is why we worked closely with Chilli Furniture over the course of a few weeks to ensure that the migration to automated order processing was as seamless as possible. Throughout the rollout we closely monitored the application for any errors or mistakes in the order processing and continually made new software updates to ensure the product is at the highest standard.
Deployment
03