TGP Case Study: GiftCertificates.com - eCommerce Management

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Situation

GiftCertifcates.com, an online retailer of personal and corporate gifts reached out to TGP to assist in reporting and analytics. Giftercertificates.com had just completed a transition to a new third party e-Commerce platform, and was having challenges reconciling marketing, operations and financial reporting. They reached out to TGP for our data management expertise.

Giftercertificates.com was receiving several thousand orders a day through its website. Each order was broken into two levels of sub-components for different automated and manual processes, meaning that any given order could be in over 100 combinations of states. In addition, components of orders could be shipped and billed separately. The complexity of the system, combined with staff turnover meant that no one person in the organization understood how the data corresponded to business processes.

Challenges

Giftercertificates.com needed to know what programs were and were not profitable in its consumer business. At the same time, the company needed to identify opportunities to improve profitability of its consumer business.

Outcome

TGP performed a rigorous data audit, identifying 13 technical processes which could generate orders in the order management system. From there we investigated and documented the marketing channels that corresponded to these technical processes, so as to understand the real world significance the data.

Having identified the origin of all orders in the order management system, we moved forward and reconciled the incoming orders to the orders shipped, billed, and finally the revenue generated according to cash flow. The cash flow and shipping was matched to the movement of orders through 2 different levels of granularity (suborders and ship-to's), each of which had 10 and 11 unique states, respectively. To unwind the dependencies and understand where the dollars were - or were not - coming from, we investigated the business processes associated with each order's component state.

Through this analysis, we determined that the inconsistent data being reported up to the CEO was more than a matter of how the data was being calculated in different reports. In actual fact, $200,000 worth of orders were left unbilled after the implementation of the new e-Commerce system, and an additional $30,000 in unprocessed orders were being accumulated on a monthly basis. TGP identified where and how these orders were getting hung up. Some were being held up due to data bugs which kept fulfillment staff from seeing the orders, some were held up by operational issues, and others were shipped but not billed for, incurring real costs. By generating a repeatable analysis that could be run on a monthly basis, TGP provided GiftCertificates.com the means to realize an additional $30,000/month crucial to their bottom line.

ROI on TGP Effort

For less than $60,000, TGP identified several loopholes in the GiftCertificate.com's order data management, enabling Giftercertificates.com to earn $360,000 more over the first year.