One of the Largest Marketplaces

Introduction:

This E-commerce giant is one of India’s largest marketplaces with over 200,000 active sellers listed to date and over 15 million SKU’s live on the website. Their GMV (Gross Merchandize Value) at the end of 2014 was worth $3 billion.

Challenges:

This E-commerce company’s phenomenal growth over the past few years and its migration from a daily deals website to the marketplace model in a very short time demanded that they on-board sellers at a massive scale.

Key challenges faced by the company with regards to marketplace quality control:

• Dependency on manual intervention for grammatical errors, plagiarism led to issues in quality and factual errors.
• Manual checks had to be conducted across 20-25 mandatory fields (content and cost details) on an average for every SKU, leading to large turnaround times for generating content.
• Inconsistency of product data that was provided by sellers led to issues in findability on the website.
• Normalization of data without compromising on quality was extremely difficult in the TAT’s agreed between sellers and the company.
• Banned or negative keyword used in the descriptions could not be eliminated, affecting the company’s keyword rankings.

Solution:

The Indian E-commerce market is nascent, and sellers are not tech savvy. Iksula, using our subject matter expertise, developed a tool that would help simplify content upload and standardize quality. This has helped the company enhance the consumer experience. The key parameters we addressed using the tool were:

Automation:

• Most of the mandatory field checks like missing/prefilled values, banned keywords, and title length were completely automated leading to increase in productivity.
• Automated scripts to map and rename SKU codes to images saved a great deal of manual intensive work and eliminated errors in renaming.
• Designed an algorithm to map SKU’s to categories by keywords in Product Title, thus avoiding categorization errors.

Accelerated QA:

• Internal quality parameters introduced through the tool facilitated improvement in quality scores.
• Time taken in level 1 QA (the most time-consuming process previously) significantly reduced.
• Fewer QC resources needed due to the reduction in number of fields requiring manual checks.