Solution

Intoscape Technology Platform

• Fast accurate and automated updating of the company website, multiple times daily.
• Constant monitoring of competitor pricing and inventory levels via web robot technology.
• Constant refreshing of multiple supply sources for over 300,000 lines.
• Automated pricing of the catalogue based on bespoke business rules.
• Select and filter products to appear ‘Live on Web’ based on margin, popularity and available rich content.
• Automatic merchandising of key products in relevant marketing real estate areas of web site.
• Dashboard Merchandising Control Centre for fast reactive editing and live changes.
• Automated Procurement technology.
• Integrated eCommerce capabilities with incumbent CRM and ERP systems.

IT247.com is part of the SCC plc Group of Companies. As Europe’s largest independent IT Company, SCC plc has presence in 6 European Countries, with revenues in excess of £2 Billion, employing more than 6000 people.

The IT247.com division is an online retailer of Information Technology products to business, which uses Intoscape technology to deliver consistent value and choice to its customers. The ability to automate many of their essential business processes using Intoscape enables IT247 to better deploy its human resources in customer facing roles, thus improving customer experience and service.

The IT retail space in the UK is highly competitive, with a small number of very large operators securing good market share and literally hundreds of smaller businesses fighting for the rest, with niche offerings and limited product ranges.

IT247.com wanted to mount a serious challenge to the larger established players and realised that if it was to compete it had to deliver a very different business model, which could still compete with aggressive price points, but do so from a lower operational cost base, without sacrificing customer services and the overall customer experience.

The management team are experienced industry professionals with an excellent understanding of the available market, the supply channels and marketing environments in which they would need to compete. They could see clear opportunities to match ‘smarter’ buying from broader distribution points with popular products that were selling online at premium prices. The problem was that the market was very volatile and with stock availability and source pricing varying it would have taken an army of merchandisers, marketers and buyers to build an online catalogue and keep it fresh on a daily basis. This was exactly the strategy the existing market ‘gorilla’s’ had been forced down, so that their catalogue was only ever going to be as large or as varied as their investment in human resources would allow. The UK market leader DABS.COM is thought to be listing approximately just 16,000 products and employing a team approaching 50 people to manage it all.

Custom Built web indexing technology enables the Intoscape platform to gather competitor data, identifying products by manufacturer, part numbers and descriptions, using fuzzy logic where appropriate, and harvest price and stock availability for 1000’s of competing lines from multiple competitor sites. Web services then push resultant data in to the Intoscape consolidation engine ready for price comparison against the previously gathered supplier feeds.

IT247.com’s reduced overheads and lean business processes enable them to optimise the margins on a line by line basis across their whole catalogue, after fully considering all incremental sales costs such as; credit card or debt finance transaction charges, logistics costs and marketing fees.

Most importantly all catalogue PRICING IS HANDLED AUTOMATICALLY by the Intoscape platform, which enables the company to maintain a much larger and more accurate online product catalogue than any other UK business currently.

Key Measurement

Competitor organisations will typically be maintaining catalogues of up to 20,000 products. This will involve large product management, merchandising, marketing and purchasing teams, with a retailer employing up to 50 people in these roles alone. To manually build a catalogue instance of 20,000 lines where pricing is done manually and competitor analysis is considered a human response, the process can take several months and the daily maintenance of the inventory is restricted to the human resources available.

Through the innovative use of the Intoscape platform IT247.com are currently sourcing and comparing around 300,000 technology products. They are auto-selecting products based on popularity and profitability algorithms, automatically setting prices to remain competitive whilst optimising margins and adding rich content to each record before publishing to a dynamic web store.

Result The resultant catalogue lists around 50.000 items live on the web and completes the whole refresh procedure in just 24 minutes! The merchandising team responsible consists of three people working normal business hours. This represents a major step change in the management of products, pricing and procurement in the online sales sector and Intoscape is unique in its ability to manage all facets within a single integrated application.

IT247.com have entered the highly competitive UK computer reseller market and in under 12 months have built good market share in the B2B arena, attracting over 10000 visitors daily and processing around 4000 unique orders monthly with higher than average order values across all categories. The business experienced growth of 30-40% month on month in its first year and continues to grow, as its own web marketing and optimisation initiatives begin to take effect. Intoscape has been fully integrated using standard web services technology with the company’s .net based dynamic web site and a third party ecommerce shopping cart and online customer relationship management centre hosted by their ERP partner Netsuite. Total Commerce Management Limited have developed the Intoscape application and platform sympathetic to standard Communication and Messaging Architecture and based core elements on the Microsoft .NET Platform. The flexible system facilitates Integration at Database, Object and Service levels and fully supports the creation of “Adaptors” for most ERP, MRP systems, Accounting, and Supply Chain Management systems.