Introduction
India’s largest NBFC embarked on a mission to create a digital platform which will act as a new distribution channel for the NBFC’s seller community and enable its dealers to sell consumer durables and lifestyle products on "No Cost EMI". The initial focus was to leverage NBFC's extensive dealer network across India, ensuring swift product delivery ranging from 2 hrs to two days. Transactions were offered to NBFC’s EMI Card holders during the initial phase.
This case study highlights the evolution of this marketplace, highlighting its strategic vision, challenges faced, and innovative solutions which made it India’s largest hyperlocal marketplace.
Business Challenge:
Bajaj Technology Services (BTS) was given the responsibility of developing and maintaining the platform. The major challenges that needed to be addressed for this were:
- Creating a cutting-edge digital platform which will offer scalability and reliability
- Creating a seller portal for the dealer community with an integrated onboarding journey with the NBFC’s CRM and ease of use for daily uploading of price and inventory
- Ensure the GTM of new categories is reduced
- Ensure all customer events are tracked
Cutting Edge Digital Platform:
The Bajaj Technology Services Team sought for out of box solutions in the market for an eCommerce engine which would fulfil all the client’s requirements. After evaluating multiple options, the team finalized Magento Community Edition as the backend eCommerce engine. Magento provided a robust and highly customizable foundation, enabling businesses to tailor their online stores. It had extensive modules for catalogue management, coupon code creation and cart handling functionalities. At the start we used Magento as our Frontend and all our page templates – Home Page, Category Landing Page, Product Listing Page, Product Detail Page etc. were created on Magento. As the platform scaled up, BTS recommended investing in an enterprise solution – Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), for efficient content management and to ensure a consistent and engaging online presence. All the page templates were recreated on AEM which consisted of static and dynamic templates and components. For the infrastructure, we decided to utilize AWS (Amazon Web Services) for scalable and secure cloud computing, enabling flexibility and reliability in managing online operations. To ensure efficient content delivery and offer a seamless, swift online shopping experience we decided to leverage Akamai. Overall, this was the core tech stack on which the digital platform was built.
- Seller Portal: One major requirement from the client was to provide the dealer community with a portal where they will have a simplified onboarding journey and intuitive interface for uploading their inventory and prices. Bajaj Technology Services looked for out of the box solutions in the market but didn’t find any product which met the client’s needs. As a result, the decision was taken to custom built the seller portal.A custom portal was created which was integrated with the NBFC’s CRM system which enabled their dealers to visit the portal via a click from their CRM. An onboarding journey was developed to allow the dealers to e-sign the agreements and login into the seller portal. The portal had number of features which allowed the dealers to seamlessly upload the prices, inventories and delivery timeline for eligible SKUs via bulk upload. It incorporated customer friendly UI which allowed the dealers to check their Active, Inactive SKUs, provisions for large dealers to see, modify and upload the inventory and prices of their child dealers etc. For few large dealers, we also created push Inventory API which would directly update the prices and inventories when it’s pushed from the Dealer’s system.
- Reduction in GTM for launching New Categories: Once the digital platform was established, one of the key objectives was to expand into categories outside of consumer durables and lifestyle products. Expansion into Auto Marketplace required different components on most of the page templates while maintaining the same user experience of the platform. The major challenge was to reduce the GTM(Go to Market) time for launching these categories. To achieve this, we used AEM’s capabilities to create dynamic page templates for the two categories. This enabled us to go live with the new categories (30% better time efficiency). The look and feel of the platform were kept the same while category specific components had been integrated. The addition of new categories had a significant impact on the overall business.
- Tracking of all Events: The NBFC had a strong Data architecture in its offline business. In line with that, the eCommerce Marketplace was equipped with state-of-the-art Google Analytics (GA) Premium version to track each and every customer action. Bajaj Technology Services Team worked with the business stakeholders to finalize all the critical attributes which would be required for tracking. Google Analytics provided standard datalayer codes for critical eCommerce events like Product Detail Views, Add to Cart Clicks, Checkout, Checkout Complete, Banner Impressions and Clicks etc. We incorporated these into the platform to utilize GA’s default capabilities. Complete designing of the datalayers was then done by Bajaj Technology Services (BTS) team complemented with the development team to ensure that the implementation is carried out smoothly. One key principal followed in all our datalayers implementation was to capture the system generated Customer ID (which was the unique id for the logged in customer) for seamless attribution. Once the datalayers were integrated, detail dashboards were created on Looker Studio to provide insights to help the business teams in decision making. The data was also transferred to the NBFC’s Data Warehouse to make integrated dashboards by merging it with CRM and Offline data, analyse the clickstream data more thoroughly, create propensity models using a mixture of online and offline data etc.
Impact
Strategic initiatives for the platform have yielded impressive results, establishing it as India's largest hyperlocal marketplace. The inclusion of diverse categories and expanded payment options has led to substantial growth in footfall, revenue and customer satisfaction.
The transformative journey of the eCommerce Marketplace exemplifies the successful integration of ecommerce and financial services, demonstrating the power of innovation and adaptability in meeting the evolving needs of consumers. The strategic alignment with the NBFC, the ingenious use of the dealer network, and the dynamic solutions to customer challenges have positioned the Marketplace as a pioneer in the intersection of digital and financial services.
