Part 2: Consulting Case for
Developing a shopping mall
By jake park(jake.kbpark@gmail.com)
Most
small and medium-sized enterprises have a shopping mall with their business
strategy. Then why do they ask for e-commerce consulting? Companies may want to
see the distant future and have their shopping malls suitable for the trend.
In
this case, company A, which has already been a shopping mall site for years, is
an importer of fashion and other merchandise. Unfortunately, due to the old
logistics system (WMS, OMS), company A could not have synced the connection of
the product procurement, sales, and management process, so it was judged that
the inventory needed to be appropriately managed. Company A's goal was to
increase net revenue and expand its business area of featured products.
For
this goal, the company has requested consulting to improve our e-commerce
processes and develop their own advanced and stable shopping mall with high
availability.
How to consult on e-Commerce
Before
you begin full-scale e-commerce consulting, you will agree on your vision and
objectives with the customer and make a rough blueprint for the To-be shopping
mall system. In other words, you can capture the features of the virtual target
system aligned to the customer's requirements.
Following
the consulting process, the process and related system linkage plan are
reviewed, and the stages of Planning, Current State Review, Proposal, and
consultation are sequentially carried out.
< Example of e-commerce consulting methodology>
Identification of
improvements and solutions
The
significant issues in the focus group interview will identify improvement
opportunities. At the beginning of the consultation, a consultant will discover
improvements and consulting solutions on those issues through dozens of
questions. Consultants discuss improvement tasks with customers at each step
and prioritize solutions applied next shopping mall.
Suggestion of the best way to
build your mall
By
presenting the various improvement tasks and solutions mentioned above, you
will make a final suggestion on how to build the first e-commerce shopping
mall. The customer chooses the proposal considering the construction cost
budget and the construction's duration, then plans a new development project
and proceeds with the construction of the shopping mall. In this case, I
proposed three shopping mall development plans.
Plan 1) Individual malls for
each brand.
We
can develop an online shopping mall for each brand of the company (e.g., luxury
fashion, etc.)
Plan 2) An integrated mall
with own various brands
We
can develop a form in which an integrated mall is established by branding the
relevant company as a reclassified product group in its mall (e.g., the
shopping mall of a large company)
Plan 3) A comprehensive
commerce platform.
We
can develop a general mall that stores its brand and other brands based on
enterprise size. (e.g., extensive retail shopping malls, etc.).
Three recommendations for developing
an e-commerce shopping mall
Firstly,
we need to understand what the company is doing to develop a shopping mall.
Clients will offer a high-quality solution if they know exactly what's going on
before consulting.
Secondly,
consulting costs are investments. Of the budget for IT system deployment, consulting
budgets should also be considered at around 5% from experience. In experience,
small and medium-sized companies want to build shopping malls to increase
sustainability, efficiency, and availability for SI-specialized IT companies,
so expectations for e-commerce consulting are high. For this, please make sure
to set a preliminary budget for consulting.
Thirdly,
Meeting a consultant who knows your company well or wants to understand the
industry is important. Also, what customers want is the experience in related
fields. Consultants who have experienced various contexts will be able to
discover new ideas and build shopping malls for customers who wish to use
multiple solutions.
In
summary, e-commerce consultants can propose optimal business solutions. It is
crucial to improve issues from a 3rd party's point of view and to build a new
e-commerce shopping mall. I have many e-commerce business consultants to
demonstrate how you can create or add value.
In
the following article, I will show you a customer segmentation case
resulting from my e-commerce consulting project.
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connections
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