After successfully implementing a total Customer Support Solution which helped increase Customer Satisfaction levels, I moved on to managing the e-commerce platform for the company. In this role I was more of a product manager entrusted with planning and ensuring that the necessary enhancements were made to the existing ecommerce system in an attempt to move it towards becoming a platform on which various services and offerings could be built.
One of the early challenges was redoing the entire classification of products on the site. The existing taxonomy was a mess with categories and sub-categories having been added at random with little or no control built in for the addition of categories. The navigation on the site needed to be redone allowing for a more organized approach to browsing and searching for products. There was a need for providing the vendors with a tool for uploading their products on a regular basis. This was being done by inhouse staff and as the business was growing it was not scaling. The browsing experience searching for products either through the categories or through the search needed improvement as performance was becoming an issue.
The project that was taken on was to address all these issues. What came out of the entire exercise was a makeover for the site with a complete new product taxonomy which was cleaner and more organized. This allowed consumers to find products that they were looking for much more easily than before. The search engine was improved and searching for products started yielding more relevant results. The content was served from content distribution network providers so that the consumer’s browsing experience improved a great deal with faster downloads. The shopping cart functionality and the entire checkout was redesigned and implemented which improved the shopper’s experience. There was new features added on which included vendor ratings, which allowed the shoppers to rate their experiences with the various vendors from whom they had shopped. This allowed other shoppers to make informed decisions while shopping for products from the vendors.
The vendor catalog that was implemented allowed vendors to manage product uploads and updates by themselves so that they could increase the scale of their offerings. This helped increase the number of product categories and products on the shopping that could now be offered to the customers.
There were changes made in the order tracking system which allowed configuring of additional business rules to help operations. The Vendors system was improved to allow vendors to see online their orders and update dispatch and delivery status which in turn helped service the customers better.
The platform was enhanced to allow third party catalogs to be used with the shopping platform so that external vendors with their own catalogs could use the shopping platform to offer their products to our shoppers.
