Education portal and online bookstore Central Books Online offers a wide selection of textbooks, reference books, study material for competitive exams, novels, stationery, and other general purpose books. In addition to selling its product range on a website, CBO also has an Amazon store.
Their challenge: Scaling up on Amazon
Owing to the competitive nature of the category, Amazon has many other sellers pushing the same products. This has led to CBO not being able to meet its projected growth. In order to scale up as per their plans, CBO needs to fulfill two objectives:
- Win the buy box for most of their product listings, which will drive more customers to their products instead of their competitors. The initial buy box win percentage is estimated at 10%
- Maintain the highest possible margins after price reductions from Amazon as well as other investment and operational costs
Our strategy: Creating an analytical dashboard to study buy box percentage
Tenovia’s analytical dashboard would conduct a detailed week-on-week study of the buy box percentage, crawling data from four primary locations – each representing east, west, north, and south zones. In addition, the dashboard would also read competitor details such as who won the buy box, its price, ratings, discounts, and delivery times.
Using this data, we were able to deduce reasons as to why CBO lost the buy box to other vendors. This exercise provided specific and actionable insights to boost CBO’s buy box win percentage by optimizing product pricing, tracking buy box allocation for the entire product catalog, and escalating issues on time.
The results: Key takeaways and successes
With Tenovia’s support through the analytical dashboard, we offered CBO a method of accurately forecasting, which minimized inventory idle time in the warehouse and operational expenses. Tensight’s data also allowed CBO to design their promotions, pricing, and purchases – ultimately boosting sales and profit margins.
CBO now enjoys:
- Total visibility of all their products with detailed insights on their competitors to take informed decisions
- Total calibration of their pricing strategy and inventory management, allowing them to win their buy box
- Reduced product delivery times due to improved inventory flow as well as higher availability and stock fill rates across regions
- Week over week, we could see a good improvement in the buy box wins % (from 21.4% to 26.9%) when the reasons that is pulling the chance down is calibrated with the help of Tensight.
- With consistent operational efforts by working with the reports generated they were able to bring down their reasons that was hindering their buy box wins%
- In the beginning 68.38% they were losing their buy box because of their price competence, which upon consistent optimization, they were able to bring down to 51.64%
- 55.76% they were unable to win buy box due to non availability of their stock at the Amazon Fulfillment Centers. With the help of the dashboard report they were able to identify the exact ASINs that would have to be moved to respective FCs for optimal chances reducing the reasons to win the buy box to 42.74%
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