E-commerce solutions gain insights that boost sales

Improved product margin insight

WatchWarehouse of London, a fourth-generation family business selling everything from simple to luxury timepieces, moved into e-commerce for the first time in 2008. But since then, the market has become much more competitive, both from new suppliers as well as from smartwatches, says Leah Moore, the company’s eBay manager.

With the increased competition, it became imperative for the company to garner more details about the demand, margin and other sales information by product, country, region, etc.—capabilities that were beyond those of its legacy technology.

So earlier this year, the company added Terapeak, an e-commerce analytics engine that enables companies to source inventory, evaluate sales and optimize inventory.

“This is much more user friendly than what we had before,” Moore says. “The previous system was very frustrating to use. This provides us with much more depth and detail. It provides us with much more information about our biggest revenue drivers and the products that provide the most profit. So now we can focus our time on the top products, sourcing more products that customers really want and spending less time on the products that customers don’t want.”

Through the knowledge Terapeak gathers, WatchWarehouse discovered that relatively inexpensive Casio watches, due to sheer volume, provide more to the bottom line than high-end luxury watches, so the company has shifted its product mix accordingly. Because the application is relatively new, WatchWarehouse expects to learn in the months ahead about additional benefits it is deriving from the product.

As e-commerce becomes an ever-increasing percentage of retail sales, better KM-related systems will continue to provide companies with better insight into revenue, margin and efficiency opportunities.